“With AI, support teams are going to disappear.”
I hear this sentence more and more often.
And, to be completely honest, I am not sure it is the right question.
I would rather ask how artificial intelligence will transform our jobs… than try to guess which ones it will replace.
Because, on the ground, that is not what I see.
Let me tell you a short story.
When ChatGPT runs the Friday drinks…
At our last company seminar, we wanted to put together a quiz to liven up the Friday evening drinks.
As often happens in a small company, we ran out of time.
We had two options.
Give up.
Or accept that not everything would be perfect.
We chose the second option.
We asked ChatGPT to help us build a quiz with a music blind test.
The titles, the artists, the YouTube links… everything went much faster.
And since honesty is one of our values, we told our colleagues from the very start that the quiz had been prepared with the help of artificial intelligence.
The atmosphere was excellent.
Everyone joined in.
Then came the song À nos actes manqués.
We announced the answer confidently:
“Louise Attaque!”
And then…
Part of the room immediately protested.
“No! It's Jean-Jacques Goldman!”
They were right.
Well… almost.
The track was indeed À nos actes manqués.
But the clip we had pulled from YouTube was a cover… not the original version.
We had trusted AI.
A little too much, in fact.
We admitted our mistake.
We laughed about it.
And above all, we learned a lesson.
AI is not dangerous because it makes mistakes. It becomes dangerous when we forget to proofread it.
AI is a formidable accelerator
Since that story, I have used AI almost every day.
It helps me prepare workshops.
Structure ideas.
Write meeting minutes.
The time saved is considerable.
But I never send AI-generated minutes without reading them first.
Because sometimes all it takes is a forgotten nuance, a badly rephrased decision, or an action assigned to the wrong person.
The information looks right.
And yet… it is not entirely right.
AI is a formidable accelerator.
But it will never replace our critical thinking.
And in support?
That is exactly what I see in support teams today.
Artificial intelligence can already retrieve a procedure, summarise a ticket's history, search for information in a knowledge base, suggest an answer or write a first draft.
All these tasks represent a considerable time saving.
And that is excellent news.
Because, let's be honest…
Support teams were not hired to spend their day searching for information across several tools, or rephrasing the same answer fifty times.
On the other hand, AI does not yet know why this outage is particularly critical today.
It does not know that a user has already been through three similar incidents and has run out of patience.
It does not know that a director is waiting for an answer before a strategy committee meeting in an hour.
It knows nothing of human relationships, of context or of sensitivities.
And that is precisely where the value of support teams begins. It is also what I wrote in the previous article: users are not just looking for an answer, they want someone to take their problem in hand.
The real transformation may not be the one we expect
I also hear a lot of questions about the future of certain jobs.
Junior roles in particular.
Honestly…
I don't have the answer.
And I am not sure anyone can say for certain today.
On the other hand, there is one question that particularly concerns me, not least because I am very involved with schools and students.
For a long time, we learned our trade by looking for answers, making mistakes and watching more experienced colleagues.
Those experiences shaped our judgement.
If tomorrow some of these tasks are carried out by artificial intelligence…
How will tomorrow's professionals build that experience?
How will they develop their discernment?
I don't have the answer yet.
But I am convinced that this question deserves to be asked, starting today.
In the end…
In the end, for years, support teams have spent much of their time looking for information, qualifying requests, writing answers or completing tickets.
If artificial intelligence gradually takes over these tasks…
Then perhaps support teams will finally be able to spend more time on what really makes their value.
Understanding. Explaining. Reassuring. Deciding. Supporting.
Deep down, I don't believe artificial intelligence will replace support teams.
I believe it will mainly replace everything that stopped them from fully doing their job.
And that may well be, in the end, the first step towards what I call the human orchestrator.
A professional who no longer looks for every answer themselves, but knows how to bring in the right tools, the right information and the right people at the right time.
Artificial intelligence will never replace our critical thinking. Provided we keep exercising it.
In the next article, I will suggest going further.
Because if humans do not disappear, then their role is bound to evolve.
And what if the real job of tomorrow's support was no longer to resolve tickets… but to orchestrate the service experience?