·General
Two of my support agents asked me on day one whether AI drafting is the first step to a smaller team.
What did you actually say? We started on Monday. The first thing we are building is a drafting assistant for our support inbox: a ticket comes in, it reads the ticket and our help centre, it writes a reply, a person edits and sends. We are eleven people and seven of those are support. I said headcount is not changing this year, and I meant it, but I could hear how that lands coming from the person who paid for the training. If you have been through this I would rather hear the sentence you actually used than the right answer.
We wrote it down. One line in an email from the head of the department saying no role is being removed this year because of this. Said in a meeting it evaporates by Friday. In an email it gets forwarded to the people who were too polite to ask you directly.
What worked better than the reassurance was letting each person choose the first thing they automated. Every one of them picked the task they hate. Ours picked chasing customers for missing documents. Nobody feels replaced when the machine takes the thing they were dreading on Monday morning.
That is the opposite of what I did. I picked the first three use cases myself because I thought I was saving them the effort.
Say out loud that the work gets harder rather than lighter. Once the assistant handles password resets and "where is my refund", what is left in the queue all day is the angry ones and the genuinely complicated ones. That is a real change to the job, and people would rather hear it in week one than find it out in week three.
Six weeks in here and nobody has left. Two people have turned into the ones everybody asks for prompt help, which was on no plan of mine.
It came up again in our standup this morning, so do not expect to answer it once and be done.