Meet the AI chatbots replacing India's call-center workers (www.reuters.com)

Indian firms are increasingly deploying AI-driven chatbots and "AI agents" to handle routine call-center and customer-service tasks, allowing companies to trim headcount in repeatable roles. Vendors such as LimeChat are marketing conversational-AI platforms that automate common inquiries, route complex cases to humans, and provide 24/7 response capacity — a shift that is already reshaping hiring and cost structures across India’s large service sector. The trend is significant because India’s customer-support workforce is both large and export-oriented; automation could displace many entry-level jobs even as businesses gain efficiency. In response, training centers and IT institutes are pivoting from Java/specialist coding courses to AI, machine-learning and prompt-engineering upskilling, betting new roles in AI development, monitoring and deployment will offset losses. Technically, the move rests on advances in conversational models and process automation that make handling scripted dialogues reliable, but it raises questions about quality control, human-in-the-loop escalation, and the pace of workforce reskilling needed to avoid long-term unemployment.