AI chatbots poised to replace India's call-centre workers

In Bengaluru, a startup named LimeChat is refining artificial-intelligence chatbots that talk and message in human-like ways. The company has an audacious goal: to make customer-service jobs almost obsolete. It says its generative AI agents can slash the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries by about 80 percent.

"Once you hire a LimeChat agent, you never have to hire again," Nikhil Gupta, its 28-year-old co-founder, told Reuters. Cheap labour and English proficiency helped make India the world's back office — sometimes at the expense of workers elsewhere. Now, AI-powered systems are subsuming jobs done by headset-wearing graduates in technical support, customer care and data management, sparking a scramble to adapt, a Reuters examination found.

That disruption is driving business for AI startups that help companies slash staffing costs and scale operations — even though many consumers still prefer to deal with a person. This account of the disruptive changes transforming India's $283 billion IT sector is based on interviews with 30 people, including industry executives, recruiters, workers and current and former government officials.

Reuters also visited two AI startups and tested voice and text chatbots that handle increasingly sophisticated customer interactions in human-like ways. Rather than slow the technology, the country is accelerating, wagering that a let-it-rip approach will create enough new opportunities to absorb those displaced. The outcome of India's gamble carries weight far beyond its borders — a test case for whether embracing AI-driven disruption can pay off.