The executive president of CTT, João Bento, admitted this Friday that artificial intelligence (AI) “will cause disruptions in the short term”, but maintained that it will “surely generate new opportunities” for employment.
On the sidelines of the 31st AICEP (International Association of Portuguese Speaking Communications) Lusophone Communications Forum, which is taking place in Macau, under the theme “Creating Value with Artificial Intelligence”, João Bento told Lusa that the CTT is already using AI tools .
We launch a chatbot [de conversação] of AI, Helena, at the end of last year, which has already reduced the number of contacts requiring human intervention by 30%. This means that I have fewer people in the call center for the same level of response,” the executive highlighted.
Experts have pointed to 2024 as the year in which jobs will begin to disappear due to AI tools. But João Bento said that Both the CTT and the company’s worker unions “do not feel this fear”.
At the end of March, CTT had 13,574 workers, an increase of almost 800 compared to the same date last year.
“We will certainly have, in the short term, tasks that will no longer be performed by people, which means we will have fewer labor needs, but This will surely generate new opportunities.“, defended João Bento.
“Historically, all moments of technological fracture have caused disruptions in the short term, but they have always generated gains in wealth and well-being,” added the executive president of CTT.
João Bento preferred to say that AI already allows the company to “do more with the people it has”, using the recruitment area as an example: “We have a lot of people, we are always recruiting, and a large part of the procedure, CV analysis , it is already done automatically.”
The executive said that AI is already taking care of “repetitive tasks, which are performed with better quality or more efficiently”including a tool used in the company to complete addresses.
“When they are incomplete or poorly written, a lot depends on the knowledge of the postmen to know how to interpret an address that is not well written,” highlighted João Bento.
The executive president said he believes that it is a tool that in the future could even be commercialized by the partner company that developed it and that has already received investment from the CTT.
João Bento was more concerned about the ethical problems created by the use of AI tools and highlighted that, by using Helena, “It is very important that customers understand that they are contacting a ‘chatbot’ and not a person”.
This is one of the requirements already included in a regulation approved on March 13 by the European Parliament and which will come into force in all EU Member States, after the “green light” from the European Council.
Source: Observadora
