Dukaan CEO called out for being insensitive after posting about replacing support staff with AI chatbot

Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing humans seems like a new reality. Taking a cue from that, the enterprise e-commerce startup Dukaan claimed that it has now replaced 90 percent of its support staff with an AI chatbot called Lina in a move towards profitability.

However, the moment its founder, co-founder, and CEO Suumit Shah took to Twitter to announce the move, netizens started calling him out for being insensitive.

We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot.

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 🧵

— Suumit Shah (@suumitshah) July 10, 2023

Given the state of the economy, startups are prioritizing "profitability" over striving to become "unicorns," and so are we. It's less magical, sure, but at least it pays the bills! Customer Support had been a struggle for us for a long time, and fixing it felt like an opportunity to me,” he says.

Shah’s Twitter thread describing how quickly they made the AI chatbot and how effective the complaint redressal mechanism is, wasn’t taken well by netizens.

A user wrote, “Note to all young, starry-eyed startup folks - Make no mistake. The support team was laid off here because the business is failing and funding is dry, not because of AI.”

Another user shared the tweet stating an absolute lack of empathy.

What horrible storytelling. No emotion, no empathy. https://t.co/Mu9DtKAR2G

— Pete (@PeteJaison) July 11, 2023

One of the users called Shah out for flexing by laying off people from the organization.

I’ll not get into if this is true or not. Anyone who has worked on building a support team for SaaS product knows what is possible and what is not. Fairly easy to arrive at your own conclusion.

This is pretty horribly worded even if it is true. Weird flex but okay! https://t.co/1QCgNz5ukt

— Piyush Dinde (@PiyushDinde) July 11, 2023

Shah had revealed Dukaan's AI assistant, Lisa, a month ago in a Facebook post. The virtual assistant can answer account-specific as well as general queries about Dukaan's features and workings.

In the same Twitter thread, Shah also announced the launch of an AI-as-a-service platform called Bot9, which will allow businesses to leverage AI chatbots that understand their products and can answer customer queries. The API uses ChatGPT as its brain and is available for $69 per month on the website.

According to data compiled by Inc42, halfway through 2023, funding in India’s startup ecosystem has significantly faded further. The news website’s data suggest that Indian startups could raise only around $5 billion until June 10, 2023, down 70 percent compared to approximately $17 billion raised during the corresponding period last year.

This has forced many startups to brutally cut costs, mostly through mass layoffs. From big tech giants such as Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft to new startups such as Meesho, Byju’s, CRED, and Dunzo, many companies have fired employees.

Since the onset of the funding winter in 2022, Inc42 states that an estimated 27,103 employees have been laid off by 102 Indian startups, including several unicorns and soonicorns. Furthermore, edtech has seen the most layoffs, followed by consumer services and e-commerce. The three sectors have collectively seen 50 startups laying off 20,469 employees since last year.