Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has warned of a future where AI will eliminate entire job categories, including customer support.
The CEO made the comments last week during the Fed’s Integrated Review of the Capital Framework for Large Banks Conference in Washington.
Speaking to Michelle Bowman, Vice Chair of the Federal Reserves, Altman first stated:
There are cases where entire classes of jobs will go away, [and] there are entirely new classes of jobs that will come.
When pressed on what some of those lost jobs might be, he used customer support staff as an example of a role that will be “totally, totally gone.”
Already, various tech companies building AI agents for service have had significant success in automating customer contacts.
For instance, Salesforce and ServiceNow claim to have mechanized 85 and 80 percent of their internal customer queries, respectively.
Altman underscored this rapid progress in customer-facing AI and, like Oracle, envisaged a future where service is entirely automated.
The CEO stated: “A couple of years ago, you’d call customer support, you’d go through a phone tree, you’d talk to four different people, they’d do the thing wrong, you’d call back again, you’d wait through it… It’s like hours of pain, a ton of time on hold, and the thing you want doesn’t happen. [It was a] very frustrating experience.
Now, you call one of these things, and AI answers. It’s like a super smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, and the thing just happens. It’s done. Answers right away. Great.
“So, that’s a category where I would just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re going to be talking to an AI, and that’s fine.”
While Altman may have a point in the longer run, his assessment of today’s chatbots doesn’t align with most consumers and industry practitioners…
The End of Human Service? Studies Say That’s a Distant Prospect
Despite Altman’s prediction, research firm Cavell recently found that demand for human contact center agents will grow from 15.3 million in 2025 to 16.8 million by 2029.
While AI may have tempered that increase, its short-term threat to rep jobs appears minimal.
Gartner’s research backs this up. Last year, the analyst found that most service leaders only expect headcount reductions of five percent or less due to advances in generative AI.
Alternatively, a Microsoft report found that “customer service reps” is the sixth most at-risk job from the rise of AI. It followed interpreters/translators, historians, passenger attendants, sales reps of services, and writers/authors.
However, this threat may be longer-term than Altman’s statements suggest.
Also, studies emphasize an overwhelming preference for human customer service. For instance, one report published in early 2025 found that 81 percent of customers would rather wait a minute or more for support from a live person than interact immediately with an AI assistant.
Today’s customer service teams share this negative sentiment towards customer-facing AI. Indeed, Gartner found that three in five human agents don’t recommend self-service, with the research firm hinting that this negativity is driven by customer feedback, more so than any threat bots pose to their job security.
After all, many reps often interact with customers who feel like they had to break out of AI jail to get through to them, pounding “zero” on their keypad and yelling “agent” into the phone.
As these experiences persist, a fully automated customer service function is almost impossible for many to envision. However, with the pace of AI innovation, predicting the future is trickier than ever before.