Someone wanted to research if people would be considered expendable due to AI's emergence. As someone in tech, I came to answer. As someone who wasn't in Fidelity for a while, I assumed ops means people who work the phones.
Again, I wasn't at Fidelity for a while, and I could be wrong, I've been wrong about a lot of things Fidelity. But I think Fidelity's whole "come into the office" cr-p is a part of the brand they want to sell that they are "human".
From my (limited) experience speaking with Fidelity reps, they definitely care about the customer. And as a software engineer myself, I have to cackle at the thought that AI can replace EVERYTHING. Artificial Intelligence is merely in its infancy. We might criticize Fidelity a lot, but Abby and the other heads have to realize this is the way they make money. They know they can't replace everything with AI. There's multiple stories like this: chatbot for a bank says "Hi, I'm the AI chatbot, how can I help you today?", and you respond "my credit card was stolen and my bank account was drained", and they respond "Great! We'd be excited to help you with that!", proceeding to lead you to other links to click. That's inhumane, exactly what Fidelity is aiming to NOT do. They understand that this inhumanity in such an fragile state would crush someone - a customer. Who would decide to take their money to a company who cares. Or at least pretends they do, like Fidelity.
That's why I believe they're just trying to expand their brand that they present to the customer, to Fidelity employees. So everyone lives and breathes Fidelity, no matter what realm we're in. I think the movement is geared to fuel humanity in everything we do, but it's awfully implemented. Su-ks the life out of us, but inflates the life of Fidelity into us.
Per my example of the person who got their credit card stolen, AI will evolve to catch that. But whenever I run into a phone call with an AI, the best thing I can do to get a human automatically is A. speak a different language other than English, or B. speak utter jibberish. AI just says they'll transfer me to a person. There'll always be ways to bypass AI. We will always come up with them. AI is for automating simple work, but it will always be choppy when it comes to tasks requiring years of experience, sophistication, and dedication to the craft.
So, there are three conditions you'd have to check before phone reps would be replaced at Fidelity.
- As long as Fidelity wants to expand that brand to be personal to the customer
- AI cannot perfectly read a human
- Anyone can exploit the workarounds around AI that'd force it to delegate to a human
The second case isn't ruled out of the equation yet, but we're not there right now. As long as we have Fidelity wanting human customers to experience the greatest possible humanity they can (which is literally the company brand), you're safe there - not saying I support in office demands, but there will be something very wrong if Fidelity decides to take humanity out of the customer experience. Plus, people will always be crafty and find things AI can't pick up - you'd be surprised how funny humans can be with technology.
The phone people bring in the money. They retain the customer experience. That's what's important to Fidelity at the end of the day.
I hope I can help our allies who work the phones feel safer about their job security. Thank you for your service, you all deal with a lot.
From, a tech person, expecting various rude comments to come forward claiming I'm an id--t.