AI customer support automation increases demand for support rather than reducing headcount, because cheaper support enables companies to offer it more broadly.
Decagon's customers typically expand support access after deploying AI, leading to higher volume and retention rather than layoffs—a Jevons paradox effect. ✦ AI generated
Asha · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-31 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 116:30
“do you see the upleveling of folks folks with AI where you know maybe they were doing this job and now they're doing something else?”
Most of them are not just immediately saying, okay, now what I will do is, you know, let go of 60% of my team. They're saying okay now that this thing which is clearly valuable for my customers is much cheaper let me do more of it so that my customers retain for longer so that you know they don't turn off as much so that they activate sooner things like that you know we had a customer in the early days um they and this was you know probably two and a half years ago at this point um where they said you know our ticket volume you know the amount of customer support inquiries that we get uh per month was I I think I think it was like 50,000 a month or something based on uh you know the existing surfaces that they had. Once they started using us they said wow turns out our customers have a lot of problems they said let us make support more easily accessible right so instead of it just being in one part like buried within a support panel. They're like let's put support on every page and let's make it more prominent in places where people are more likely to get stuck.
verbatim transcript · starts at 116:30
(01:15:40) creating jobs I'm curious how do you turn that narrative on its head that folks are just losing their jobs right like do you see the upleveling of folks folks with AI where you know maybe they were doing this job and now they're doing something else. >> Yeah. I mean we we we see this all the time. Uh because uh if you recall earlier on when we were talking about
(01:16:00) okay what are we truly doing? Um, we found that in a for a lot of our customers, there's actually just more demand for things like customer support than there's supply, >> right? >> Where companies realize that they're like, okay, if our cost of doing customer support drops by 30%. Most of them are not just immediately saying, okay, now what I will do is, you know, let go of 60% of my team. They're saying
(01:16:30) okay now that this thing which is clearly valuable for my customers is much cheaper let me do more of it >> so that my customers retain for longer so that you know they don't turn off as much so that they activate sooner things like that >> you know we had a customer in the early days um they and this was you know probably two and a half years ago at
(01:16:50) this point um where they said you know our ticket volume you know the amount of customer support inquiries that we get uh per month was I I think I think it was like 50,000 a month or something based on uh you know the existing surfaces that they had. Once they started using us they said wow turns out our customers have a lot of problems they said let us make support more