Say goodbye to most customer service jobs.

The Wall Street Journal reportsPhoenix Built an Empire of Cubicle Jobs. AI Is Coming to Tear It Down.

Abundant land and cheap labor made Phoenix a premier place for companies to stash lower-paid office workers who don’t need to be physically close to clients or headquarters. The cubicle-based jobs—customer service, data entry, payroll processing—created a vital ladder to the middle class, helping replace factory work lost to overseas competition.

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Now, these white-collar jobs are fading, too, thanks to continued offshoring and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Tens of thousands of local workers suddenly face an uncertain future.

A test grader saw her work outsourced to India. A customer-relations manager, recently laid off and his savings running low, is looking to become a bartender.

“I’m concerned that a lot of call-center workers will not have jobs pretty soon, me included,” said Vonda Wilkins, a Phoenix-based customer-service representative.

Many of her co-workers lost their jobs last year as their employer, Lumen Technologies, relied more on AI to engage with customers and landline use continued to drop. The technology has made her work more challenging, Wilkins says: Customers who reach her often had to talk first to bots and are more likely to be in a bad mood. The 49-year-old is making plans to go to nursing school.

Offshoring has been chipping away at back-office jobs for decades. Yet around 16.5 million Americans work in office- and administrative-support jobs like customer-service reps, office clerks and data-entry keyers, according to the Labor Department. That’s still more than the number working in manufacturing, but also down from around 18 million at the end of 2019. The number of customer-service representatives in metro Phoenix alone has tumbled 26% in the most recent four-year span the department measured.

Between 2000 and 2019, the number of people working in manufacturing fell by 26%, according to the Labor Department. During that period, full-time customer-service reps grew by 32%.

Source: SGT Report