What industry is secretly on the verge of collapsing, but people outside of it haven’t noticed yet?

ChaLenCe
call centers in Asia are getting wiped out by Ai

phlostonsparadise123
Customer service in general is getting wiped out by AI. Places like Amazon are the main culprits for this. The Help chat is now entirely AI-driven and you have to jump through hoops within the chat or navigate through tons of pages to communicate with an actual human.

sengirminion
So I work in a call center in the inbound collections department for a large bank.

And one of our primary job functions is to speak with Debt Settlement Agencies who are representing customers. These are all pretty formulaic calls, just confirming information and following basic pre-determined negotiation on settlement terms and setting up payments.

Well about a year ago we started getting calls from “agents” who sounded completely weird. And we quickly found out these were AI agents that some companies were using to do basic tasks like confirming account information was accurate. We had to adjust some of our procedures to account for these AI agents and set rules about what we could and could not do with them.

The wildest thing I experienced with one of them was an AI agent who I KNEW was AI because of the way it spoke, and whoever programmed it gave it a vaguely Indian name, and a freaking Indian accent. It was so wild that the designers would choose to give a robot an Apu from the Simpsons style name and accent just to try and hide the fact it was AI when dealing with an American call center.

We are cooked.

faberge_surprise
just wait till your bank replaces you with ai too and then it’ll just be ai talking to ai

“this could have been an api call” is gonna be the new “this could have been an email”

_Z_E_R_O
It might not be a full collapse, but EMS is hanging on by a thread, and that was true even before covid. Now it’s verging on a crisis.

EMTs get paid barely above minimum wage, and the turnover rate is astronomical. A lot of people in the industry view it as a stepping stone to a “better” medical job (usually nursing or ER staff), and it’s not uncommon to recruit EMTs straight out of high school.

In the past many employees put up with the low wages and high stress because they were attached to a fire department or small operation within their own community, and there was often a “family” atmosphere in these spaces, but with the corporatization of healthcare you now have all of the shittiness with none of the upsides. Those eye-tracking cameras the government is trying to shove in cars? Yeah, they were rolled out in ambulances first.

It’s no surprise that a 19-year-old doesn’t want to a job where you can get written up for sipping a coffee in the driver’s seat while you’re 10 calls deep into a 12-hour road shift, all for the privilege of being paid less than a burger flipper.

theassassintherapist
Translation and interpretation services

A_Dog_Chasing_Cars
Yup. Been a translator since 2016, am now an English teacher who does the occasional translation or proofreading for the rare person who cares about quality.

This field is dead. It’s a zombie. It’s doomed.

braaibros
Picture frames. Young people are not printing and framing pictures and older people who do are dying off

kolejack2293
Any kind of cheaper restaurant in any big expensive city (NYC, Boston, Miami etc).

It’s become impossible to be a low-cost, low-price local restaurant. You know, the local family mexican or italian restaurant with $12 entrees, those kinda places.

They are all raising their prices to the median now because rent is now a much larger portion of their costs. It used to be that they were able to remain cheap by keeping ingredient and labor costs low, but that simply doesn’t matter much now. Saving $1,500 a month on ingredients doesn’t mean jack shit when your rent has gone from $6,000 to $14,000 in five years.