At its core, artificial intelligence empowers machines to perform tasks previously thought to require human intelligence.

The technology has existed in early versions for decades, having emerged with a problem-solving computer program, the Logic Theorist, built in the 1950s at what’s now Carnegie Mellon University.

More recently, think of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Or IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, which managed to beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Yet the widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots took many factory and warehouse jobs, isn’t becoming reality in any widespread way — not yet, anyway. And maybe it never will.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found “little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.’’

The advisers noted that history shows technology typically makes companies more productive, speeding economic growth and creating new types of jobs in unexpected ways.

They cited a study this year led by David Autor, a leading MIT economist: It concluded that 60 per cent of the jobs Americans held in 2018 didn’t even exist in 1940, having been created by technologies that emerged only later.

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labour-saving AI.

“I don’t think we’ve started seeing companies saying they’ve saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,’’ said Andy Challenger, who leads the firm’s sales team.

“That may come in the future. But it hasn’t played out yet.’’

At the same time, the fear that AI poses a serious threat to some categories of jobs isn’t unfounded.

Consider Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who caused a uproar last year by boasting that he had replaced 90 per cent of his customer support staff with a chatbot named Lina.

The move at Shah’s company, Dukaan, which helps customers set up e-commerce sites, shrank the response time to an inquiry from 1 minute 44 seconds to “instant.”

It also cut the typical time needed to resolve problems from more than two hours to just over three minutes.

“It’s all about AI’s ability to handle complex queries with precision,’’ Shah said by email.

The cost of providing customer support, he said, fell by 85 per cent.

“Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,’’ Shah posted on X.

Dukaan has expanded its use of AI to sales and analytics. The tools, Shah said, keep growing more powerful.

“It’s like upgrading from a Corolla to a Tesla,’’ he said.

“What used to take hours now takes minutes. And the accuracy is on a whole new level.’’

Similarly, researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and London’s Imperial College Business School found in a study last year that job postings for writers, coders and artists tumbled within eight months of the arrival of ChatGPT.

A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University concluded that telemarketers and teachers of English and foreign languages held the jobs most exposed to ChatGPT-like language models.

But being exposed to AI doesn’t necessarily mean losing your job to it. AI can also do the drudge work, freeing up people to do more creative tasks.

The Swedish furniture retailer IKEA, for example, introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries.

Instead of cutting jobs, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer-service workers to handle such tasks as advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls.

Chatbots can also be deployed to make workers more efficient, complementing their work rather than eliminating it.

A study by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of MIT tracked 5,200 customer-support agents at a Fortune 500 company who used a generative AI-based assistant.

The AI tool provided valuable suggestions for handling customers. It also supplied links to relevant internal documents.

Those who used the chatbot, the study found, proved 14 per cent more productive than colleagues who didn’t. They handled more calls and completed them faster.

The biggest productivity gains — 34 per cent — came from the least-experienced, least-skilled workers.

At an Alorica call centre in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one customer-service rep had been struggling to gain access to the information she needed to quickly handle calls.

After Alorica trained her to use AI tools, her “handle time’’ — how long it takes to resolve customer calls — fell in four months by an average of 14 minutes a call to just over seven minutes.

Over a period of six months, the AI tools helped one group of 850 Alorica reps reduce their average handle time to six minutes, from just over eight minutes.

They can now field 10 calls an hour instead of eight — an additional 16 calls in an eight-hour day.

Alorica agents can use AI tools to quickly access information about the customers who call in — to check their order history, say, or determine whether they had called earlier and hung up in frustration.

Suppose, said Mike Clifton, Alorica’s co-CEO, a customer complains that she received the wrong product.

The agent can “hit replace, and the product will be there tomorrow,” he said.

“ ‘Anything else I can help you with? No?’ Click. Done. Thirty seconds in and out.’’

Now the company is beginning to use its Real-time Voice Language Translation tool, which lets customers and Alorica agents speak and hear each other in their own languages.

“It allows (Alorica reps) to handle every call they get,” said Rene Paiz, a vice president of customer service.

“I don’t have to hire externally’’ just to find someone who speaks a specific language.

Yet Alorica isn’t cutting jobs. It continues to seek hires — increasingly, those who are comfortable with new technology.

“We are still actively hiring,’’ Paiz says.

“We have a lot that needs to be done out there.’’