Interest in “lazy girl” jobs has surged as Gen Z rejects hustle culture, embraces doing the bare minimum on Mondays, and takes work at a snail’s pace.
But one CEO has dealt a blow to those looking for low-stress, remote roles that are well paid and mainly entail repetitive tasks like responding to emails: Such jobs may no longer exist in the very near future because of AI.
Suumit Shah, the CEO of India-based Duukan, sparked backlash for replacing most of his customer support team with chatbots earlier this year—before boasting about it on Twitter, now X.
However, the commerce chief has no qualms about the move. Instead, he insists that’s where the future of work is heading and that all workers who copy and paste for a living will be out of jobs soon because AI can do them more efficiently, for much less.
“That job is gone. 100%,” Shah told the Washington Post.
“It was [a] no-brainer for me to replace the entire team with a bot,” he added, “which is like 100 times smarter, who is instant, and who cost me like 100th of what I used to pay to the support team.”
Despite the backlash, Shah insists he’s forward-thinking
Back in July, Shah boasted on X about how much more efficient his business is having sacked 90% of his customer support team and replaced them with chatbots.
Although he initially described the move as “tough” but “necessary,” he went on to gloat about how response time has gone from 1 minute 44 seconds to instant and that customer support costs have reduced by 85% since building and implementing Dukaan’s AI assistant.
We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot.
— Suumit Shah (@suumitshah) July 10, 2023
Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
The results?
Time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT!
Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s
Customer support costs reduced by ~85%
Here's how's we did it 🧵
“Given the state of economy, startups are prioritizing ‘profitability’ over striving to become ‘unicorns,’ and so are we,” Shah wrote in a series of tweets.
As previously reported in Fortune, championing mass layoffs for the sake of the bottom line and a not-humanly-possible response time didn’t land well—especially at a time when many workers were struggling to pay their own bills as the cost of living spiraled globally.
Still, despite being condemned as “heartless” and “tone-deaf,” Shah has doubled down on his stance, insisting to Fortune that he’s forward-thinking.
“AI has significantly optimized Dukaan’s customer service workflow, allowing us to focus on more creative and complex tasks,” he said, adding that the company has built yet another chatbot builder, Bot9, to help other organizations emulate his firm’s success with AI.
“Since my tweet, over 25,000 businesses have built their AI assistant, and this is just the beginning,” he added.
Look out, ‘lazy girl’ workers: He’s not alone
For Gen Z workers, 2023 has been the year of rejecting hustle culture. First came “quiet quitting,”, and then “loud quitting,” “Bare Minimum Mondays,” and “lazy girl” jobs swiftly followed.
“Lazy girl jobs are my favs, all I do is copy and paste the same emails, take three to four calls a day, take my extra long break, take more breaks, AND get a nice salary,” the TikTok user @raeandzeebo posted to the interest of almost 10 million viewers.
Beyond the current 1.6 million likes on her video alone, the #lazygirljob TikTok hashtag currently has over 29 million views, with other young women sharing what their own lazy girl jobs look like—but, not for long it seems.
Shah is among a growing list of CEO to float the idea of a reduced, robotic workforce: According to IBM, three-quarters of CEOs are eager to adopt A.I., and they’re pointing to productivity gains as the top reason.
The tech giant’s CEO Arvind Krishna announced in August that the company is already planning to replace some 8,000 roles for that very reason.
Meanwhile, Indeed recently made sweeping layoffs in the company’s recruitment department, but none in its AI arm of the business. Now, the employment platform chief, Chris Hyams, wants to create “cyborg” recruiters that play to the strengths of both humans and AI.
