Employees who were part of the Zomato Associate Accelerator Programme (ZAAP), a year-old customer-service training initiative, have been laid off. Rather, these Zomato employees, about 500 in number, have lost their jobs to Nugget, the in-house customer-support platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Most of the impacted employees are from Gurugram and Hyderabad offices.
Nugget, which took more than three years to be created, is able to handle at least 15 million interactions a month across all Zomato platforms. That includes Blinkit and Hypercure too. With Nugget being able to solve up to 80 per cent of customer queries, the need for humans has naturally fallen drastically. Add to that the pace of growth in the food-delivery space, which has slowed tremendously, Zomato has decided to let go hundreds of members from its workforce.
Reports suggest that the resignations were forced out of most of the employees who were taken completely by surprise and did not see this coming. A few were reportedly sent a couple of warning e-mails.
Some impacted employees have reportedly revealed that they were informed of the layoff by a senior manager on Slack and told they were fired due to some fault in their performance, as per AI-generated performance data. This appears very unfair to these employees. While they were offered two months’ salary as severance, there was no mention of any notice period. Some were sacked for low attendance, while yet others were terminated due to late arrival. Certain employees were reportedly told that they were being terminated because their relationship with their managers wasn’t satisfactory or because of poor customer interactions in the past. As if that wasn’t enough, Outlook reports that the laid-off employees were asked to exit with a smile so that their colleagues do not panic or get distracted.
It is worrying to know that employees could lose their jobs on the basis of performance assessments made by AI. How is that even just?