This feels kind of arrogant? People working in many customer-facing entry level jobs do emotional labor within organisations that no AI-training has even taken aim at.
If glorified chatbots could do their work receptionists would've disappeared a long time ago.
Emotional labor is a problem, not a feature. A receptionist only needs to be polite with the guests. But unfortunately, receptionists are often subject to emotional abuse.
We've never had glorified chatbots like GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. I'm not just praising GPT; I've myself casually run through a few simulations with a hotel chain receptionist and an executive. The technology looks very competent, and aside from cost savings, there's also the customer service quality aspect (consistency particularly) and the element of removing staff from abuse.
The biggest challenge is integrating language models with live data. Making customer data accessible to them is not a problem technically (prepending prompts), but it could be a GDPR problem if a third party like OpenAI is involved (having to hand over data to a third party might make the AI receptionists unappealing to some customers -- maybe, needs to be tried). The other aspect is letting the AI make changes in a data model. But there are ways to solve that as well. When these obstacles are resolved - and there is a lot of incentive to fix them now - a lot of customer-facing reception-type work can be outsourced to AI.
By the way, some hotels are already very interested in chatbots for reception work. There has been a lot of talk about that in some chains since about 2020. Old-style NLP bots, too. But of course, GPT-3 capabilities are very appealing.
I just want to add, ordering through the McDonald's big touchscreen machine is much better than ordering through the human and that alone has elevated my affinity for McDonald's. Which other experiential leaps from replacing humans with machines remain unimplemented?
