Dukaan replaced 90% of its support staff with AI — then bragged about it publicly

On July 10, 2023, Suumit Shah, CEO of the Indian e-commerce platform Dukaan, tweeted: "We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely." He attached the receipts: time to first response down from 1 minute 44 seconds to instant, resolution time from 2 hours 13 minutes to 3 minutes 12 seconds, support costs cut by about 85%. Dukaan had also launched Bot9.ai, selling the same chatbot to other companies.

Shah justified the cuts by saying people with tech expertise did not want support jobs, making support a struggle of delayed responses and poor communication. The bot, named Lina, was tested with Dukaan's VIP community, where he said 1,400 tickets were marked resolved in one night. The public read the thread differently: users asked what assistance the 90% got, and Shah replied that on Twitter people look at "profitability", not "sympathy".

The backlash went global, with wire coverage and retrospectives making Dukaan shorthand for callous automation. The most damaging reply was quiet: a customer wrote that he tried rephrasing his questions to the bot several times, it never answered properly, and he "ultimately didn't bother renewing my premium plan" — the savings metric had a churn metric hiding behind it.

Round-the-clock ridicule made Dukaan the global case study in tone-deaf automation; at least one premium user publicly cancelled, citing the bot.

Support was framed as a cost centre staffed by the wrong people — "why would someone with tech/product expertise work as a support agent?" — so cutting it read internally as an upgrade, not a loss.

The metrics were real but chosen to flatter: response speed and cost, with nothing measuring what customers lose when there is no human left to escalate to.

The announcement doubled as marketing for Bot9.ai; the layoff thread was a product launch, and the laid-off staff were the demo.

Shah answered the first question about severance with mockery, converting a policy story into a character story that travelled much further.

Efficiency gains do not sell themselves — the announcement IS the product. Automating support and mocking empathy in the same thread costs more than salaries saved.

Dukaan became the standard citation in the AI-and-jobs debate: retrospectives a year later still led with its numbers — near-instant responses, resolutions in minutes instead of hours — while relitigating whether the boast was worth it. Because Bot9.ai was selling the same automation, Dukaan's own support desk was permanently the product demo. What the viral thread never measured was the customer who said the bot left him so frustrated he let his premium plan lapse.