90% staff replaced with AI chatbot Lina, Dukaan founder Suumit Shah justifies sacking as ‘tough but necessary’; social media thinks otherwise

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Suumit Shah, the CEO of e-commerce startup Dukaan, faced huge flak online after a post of him replacing 90 per cent of his customer support team with an AI chatbot went viral on Twitter. Taking to Twitter on Tuesday, the entrepreneur revealed that he decided to prioritise prompt customer service and profitability over everything. He wrote that the use of AI tools reduced wait time from one minute, 44 seconds to instantaneous. Customer support costs were cut down by 85 per cent. “We had to lay off 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,” the entrepreneur, while presenting his case, wrote on Twitter. He also wrote about how his team developed an AI chatbot named Lina which generated instant answers to customer queries and also curated customised answers for clients. In one sweep, he claims that Dukaan was able to remove communication bottlenecks such as delayed, generic responses and also cut down costs.. “200 live chats and ~1400 support tickets have been marked as 'resolved' by Lina. I literally started feeling like Edward Morra from the movie 'Limitless' is running the entire customer support of Dukaan by himself, seriously,” he wrote. The post went viral on Twitter, amassing two million views and 2,545 likes, and counting. However, it also generated much outrage across the Internet as was expected.

Twitterati felt that Shah was using AI as a smokescreen to hide shortcomings like poor performance and lack of funding. “Note to all young starry-eyed startup folks — Make no mistake. The support team was laid off here because business is failing and funding is dry. Not because of AI,” wrote a Twitter user. Another quipped, “This is wrong on so many