AI does not replace customer service representatives. However, AI does take over parts of their duties or allows them to work (together) with AI more frequently. Researchers at Purdue University conclude that American employers are restructuring roles.

 

The researchers, Fangyan Wang, Zaiyan Wei, and Yang Wang (affiliated with Purdue University, USA), drew a sample of over 9 million job postings from a raw dataset of more than 188 million US online job postings from January 2021 through June 2025. They used those job descriptions as material to reconstruct the tasks involved in a position and subsequently assessed, for each task, whether the current generation of AI could perform that task at least half as fast while maintaining the same quality.

They then broke down each vacancy into individual tasks and divided them into three categories: activities that AI changes little (for example, because the work requires physical presence or manual action), activities that become twice as fast immediately with ready-made tools like ChatGPT (think of drafting texts, translating, summarizing), and activities that only speed up through AI embedded in widely used software (think of agent-assist-like solutions). In this third category, the activities require access to company-specific data, systems, and history. The researchers themselves cite examples for this category such as automatically suggesting answers in customer service systems and assistance in CRM and helpdesk environments.

Functions do not change their names, but their content does.

The outcome of the Purdue research It is not that AI-sensitive tasks are increasing in scope, but rather that the average exposure of job vacancies is actually decreasing after an initial rise until early 2023. A large part of that decline is attributable to task restructuring within roles that retain the same name on paper. In short, the roles are not changing names, but their content is, judging by job descriptions.

A notable aspect of the study is that the researchers used Llama-3.1-8b-instant for splitting the texts and GPT-5-nano for classification. The article has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Where this job redesign occurs most strongly varies by level of the career ladder. At the junior level—roles through which people build skills and progress to more senior positions—employer employers often adjust both recruitment and job content simultaneously. Senior positions change primarily because companies advertise different senior vacancies, and less because the work within the role changes. The redesign is therefore linked to the position on the career ladder, the researchers state.

Change visible since introduction of GenAI

According to the researchers, this task restructuring only really gained momentum from the third quarter of 2023, which is also the moment when the first enterprise variants of generative AI became available and the technology could be deployed within organizations.

The changing nature of the work of customer contact professionals is a frequent topic of discussion within the field. Recently, Janine Vos, CHRO at Rabobank, spoke out regarding the changing job content due to AI in customer contact; she even suggested that, as a result of those changes, there might possibly be a renewed the valuation of positions should be reviewed.

Purdue's research shows that the discussion at this moment should not be about whether or not jobs or positions will disappear due to the rise of AI, but about the changing design of roles and tasks. Those who deploy agent assist solutions to reduce AHT are redesigning the role of the customer contact agent, even if the job title remains the same.

AI in job descriptions

While the Purdue researchers have tried to make visible how roles change invisibly, Lightcast, partly in collaboration with Stanford, has conducted different research that specifically examines the visible AI mentions in job descriptions.

Lightcast counts how often employers explicitly list AI as a requested skill. In Lightcast's analysis, growth Job vacancies that mention generative AI skills from 55 in January 2021 to nearly 10.000 in May 2025, with an acceleration starting in early 2023. In the annual report compiled by Lightcast together with Stanford, in 2024 more than 66.000 job postings explicitly listed generative AI as a skill, compared to 16.000 in 2023, and prompt engineering rose from 1.400 to nearly 6.300 as a mention in job postings.

It is striking that in the most recent edition of that same Lightcast-Stanford report, terms such as ChatGPT, conversational AI, and chatbot actually decreased in job descriptions in 2025, while mentions of agentic AI and AI agents increased sharplyThis aligns with the logic of the Purdue researchers: the real productivity gains, and thus the impetus for redesigning tasks, do not arise from a standalone chatbot like ChatGPT, but from AI functionality embedded in the business software.

Higher salary if AI is mentioned in the job posting

Where Lightcast moreover notes that the average salary for positions with AI skills is approximately is 28 percent higher than for comparable positions withoutThe Purdue researchers point primarily to the silent redesign of tasks in roles where AI is not mentioned at all. Main conclusion: work can change without the word AI ever being mentioned in job postings.

(Ziptone/editors)

Featured, Human Resources