Every October and November, brick-and-mortar and online retailers stock up on temporary workers to meet spiking demand of the holiday shopping season. But this year’s workforce isn’t just human. A.I. agents are operating in the background, helping automate customer support tickets and train workers faster and more effectively. While Amazon (AMZN) hired 250,000 workers this fall, many of them seasonal, broader market data shows seasonal worker demand this year fell 12 percent from its 2021 peak.
While the decline in seasonal worker demand is not necessarily a result of the onset of A.I. agents, there’s no doubt change if happening, said Guillaume Luccison, founder and CEO of Yuma AI, a customer service A.I. agent platform for Shopify businesses. “What you are glimpsing here this holiday season, next year it’s going to be 2x or 3x,” Luccison told Observer. “A.I. agents are one of the reasons the workforce is changing.”
Already, Yuma AI’s top merchants are automating 40 to 60 percent of customer support tickets, improving service for customers and making the value-added work of human support agents more interesting, Luccison said.
Luccison’s view is echoed by Sid Sharma, vice president of Agora, a conversational customer service agent platform. “Seasonal hiring for customer service needs in the e-commerce and physical retail setting is about to change in fundamental ways,” he told Observer.
A.I. agents have the potential to address a key challenge of seasonal hiring. While seasonal jobs provide employment opportunities, “it creates a logistical nightmare for retailers,” Sharma said, “between the need to rapidly train, onboard and supervise a huge influx of new employees and the goal of handling as many customer interactions and sales as possible during the busiest shopping season of the year.” Then, those workers leave, taking with them institutional knowledge and starting the clock all over again for the retailer, Sharma added.
Of course, implementing A.I. in place of well trained humans during the busiest shopping season of the year has its risks. For example, missteps like “hallucinating promotions,” where chatbots placate customers with made-up offers or even refunds, demonstrate how unsupervised A.I. can misalign with brand strategy and erode trust, Bill Magnuson, co-founder and CEO of the data and engagement platform Braze, told Observer.
Even for companies still employing seasonal workers en masse, training for those workers is evolving. John Scott, head of learning and design at MasterClass, said generative A.I. is redefining the high-pressure training environment of a traditional holiday workforce. Rather than frontloading all the training in an information dump, the new era of workforce training creates continuous learning. “It makes the learning much stickier,” Scott said.
The new Masterclass at Work program caters to organizations seeking to prioritize certain skills by using generative A.I. tooling to surface video clips from the platform’s broader library, allowing them to build tailored learning programs for each customer.
Scott also envisions generative A.I. chatbots enhancing human interaction in the training process, enabling workers to ask questions without fear of judgment. “This idea that I can feel a little bit more vulnerable and not feel judged in my interactions is a powerful affordance of the technology,” he said.
