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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/CompetitionExtreme36 on 2024-05-16 13:50:13+00:00.

I own a managed service provider (MSP) firm which provides cloud computing services to clients. Business is good enough to pay my employees a respectable wage, while offering them a good work-life balance.

I have never had to lay off a single employee yet.

I hired a senior IT technician as a middle manager, let’s call him Harry. Harry seems to have gone off the rails about AI. He has started to micromonitor our coworkers to an unacceptable extent, and he has kept on pesturing me to investigate how I could use ChatGPT and other AI technologies to reduce employee costs.

Frankly, this rubbed me the wrong way. Harry does not have a stake in any of his coworkers losing their jobs, and his constant micromonitoring had become an issue.

Plus, I have had a look at ChatGPT and there is simply no way it could replace any of my technical employees. ChatGPT has no agency, nor can it can’t deal with clients, nor it can’t see the computer screen to troubleshoot jackshit.

However, ChatGPT could easily replace a middle manager, assuming someone else takes on some additional responsibility daily. You see ChatGPT has certain plugins and a Code Interpretor mode (which can do calculations and process spreadsheets as input/output). This can decimate the workload of a middle manager (at-least in our firm), allowing their responsibilities to be absorbed by another senior employee (me in this case).

I kept this in mind and have been shadowing Harry’s job for the past few months. A stellar employee retired last week. I approached Harry and told him that I took his suggestions to heart, and have decided to automate his role with AI.

I told him he could accept his redundancy package or be retrained in Azure. He chose to be retrained in Azure.

Unfortunately for Harry, he’ll lose the comfy priveleges being a middle manager entails. Fortunately for our coworkers, they will have an impartial AI making decisions. Fortunately for me, I won’t have to pay for a redundant role.