The terror of spam. The company wants others to no longer hire people for the calls, but its artificial intelligence software .
A company called Skit.AI is looking to replace people who work in call centers and wants its artificial intelligence software to make the calls to get paid.
The company promises better-than-human effectiveness making millions of outbound collection calls a week.
How will it work?
A kind of machine learning response to automated calls, Skit and its competitors offer, in essence, the same basic promise that every other AI company claims to offer: the ability to perform more menial tasks than humans, more efficiently. and at a significantly cheaper price.
“A skilled collector is hard to find, and having a consistent team that can scale when necessary has been extremely challenging,” reads a Skit blog post.
“But thanks to the instant scalability with digital collection agents, the reliance on human collectors is substantially reduced. End-to-end automation of many calls means that human agents no longer need to make those calls. Therefore , a collector can manage a larger portfolio with a smaller or the same team of agents,” it reads.
risks
The ability for automated AI systems to make phone calls to people in distress adds another dystopian element to an industry that has long focused on the poor and marginalized.
Debt collection and enforcement are much more likely to occur in black communities than white communities, and research has shown that debt and predatory interest rates exacerbate poverty by keeping people trapped in a cycle of no end.