Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab said that Alorica, and other firms like IKEA, hint that AI might not be the job-slashing monster many dread.

Instead, AI  could resemble past technological marvels like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet: eliminating some jobs while creating others.

“AI will affect many, many jobs — maybe every job indirectly to some extent. But I don't think it's going to lead to, say, mass unemployment," he said.

The pervasive belief that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, much like physical robots did in factories and warehouses, isn't materialisng on a grand scale — not yet, anyway. And perhaps it never will.

 The White House Council of Economic Advisers recently found "little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment." It noted that historically, technology boosts productivity, accelerates economic growth, and spawns new job types in unforeseen ways.

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which monitors job cuts, has yet to see significant layoffs attributed to labor-saving AI.

Andy Challenger, who heads the firm's sales team said:  "I don't think we've started seeing companies saying they've saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this. That may come in the future. But it hasn't played out yet."

However, the fear that AI poses a genuine threat to certain job categories isn't entirely baseless.

Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who sparked outrage last year by bragging that he had replaced 90 per cent of his customer support staff with a chatbot named Lina. At Shah's company, Dukaan, which assists customers in setting up e-commerce sites, response times plummeted from 1 minute, 44 seconds to "instant."

Problem resolution times dropped from over two hours to just over three minutes.

 "It's all about AI's ability to handle complex queries with precision," Shah said.  The cost of customer support, he claimed, fell by 85 per cent.

Another study by Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research, and London's Imperial College Business School found that job postings for writers, coders, and artists plummeted within eight months of ChatGPT's debut.

Conversely, when IKEA introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to manage simple inquiries, it didn't trigger mass layoffs. Instead, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer-service workers to tackle other tasks, such as advising customers on interior design and handling complex customer calls.