Teleperformance has never earned as much money as in 2023: more than 8 billion euros in turnover and an operating profit of 1.3 billion. However, when he took the stage on March 7 in London, facing an audience of financiers, Daniel Julien, the president and co-CEO of the world’s number one customer relations company, looked concerned. “Before we formally begin this meeting, I would like to talk about the “elephant in the room””this subject that everyone has in mind: “ artificial intelligence [IA] new generation »says the manager straight away.
Since the release, in November 2022, of ChatGPT, the first general public generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by the American OpenAI, Teleperformance has been caught in a whirlwind of existential questions. Will robots powered by AI, capable of solving all problems and answering all questions, replace these battalions of humans? Can a giant company like Teleperformance, which employs more than 500,000 people around the world, on all continents, disappear? The concern is materializing: in a year and a half, Daniel Julien’s group has lost two thirds of its value on the Paris Stock Exchange, weighing only 5.7 billion euros. Having entered the CAC 40 in June 2020, it is now very close to the exit.
Appearing on a large scale in the 1960s in the United States with the rise of the consumer society, call center groups developed thanks to their ability to manage customer relations for businesses or administrations at lower costs, with a simple recipe: outsource these services to countries where labor is cheap. Of its 500,000 employees, Teleperformance has barely 3,000 in France, compared to almost three times as many fifteen years ago, with the bulk of its troops now located in India, the Philippines, Colombia, Portugal and Greece. .
But if generative AI were to allow these major contractors to carry out these functions internally, efficiently and under better financial conditions, entrusting them to a service provider would make less sense. AI thus calls into question the very foundations of the existence of groups like Teleperformance or its major American competitor, Concentrix, owner since April 2023 of Webhelp, the French number two in the sector.
“Exercise common sense or empathy”
These concerns materialized in particular on February 27. That day, the young Swedish financial services company Klarna, a client of the French group, announced that its AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, does the equivalent of the work of 700 full-time advisors and has had 2.3 million of conversations just one month after its deployment, which is equivalent to two-thirds of the messages (chats) received by its customer relations department. The AI tool made it possible to resolve problems much faster and achieve a level of customer satisfaction equivalent to that of humans, supports Klarna. After these statements, Teleperformance shares plunged 35% in one week.
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