My inbox these days is filled with a never-ending stream of press pitches positioning generative AI as a solution to every problem on earth, from climate change to space exploration. Yet, perhaps the most consistent theme is its presentation as a replacement for ever more expensive and scarce human labor. Pitch after pitch after pitch touts the ability of companies' AI to take on roles long believed to require the human touch, from customer support to marketing to human resources and financial decisions. Rarely are these products presented as a way to augment human labor: instead they are almost universally presented as a way of replacing that labor.

Moreover, a growing number of these pitches cite real world case studies of their technologies' deployment in both commercial and governmental sectors. Even traditionally protectionist Europe is barnstorming the way for generative AI deployment.

Take for example a pitch that arrived a few days ago touting the adoption of a generative AI call center solution by a European municipal government. The pitch noted that the government had already worked hard to deflect as many phone calls to government services to its website as possible where they could be handled by AI chatbots. But, it noted that the government still received more than 70,000 phone calls from citizens per month across its myriad public-facing agencies. To rectify this, the government adopted a generative AI-powered call center tool that over a two month period took over responding to more than 43% of all incoming calls from citizens, with significant room left for continued automation.

The local government touted that "this success has allowed us to maintain our service levels while streamlining operations" and "opens opportunities for staff redeployment … contributing to potential operational cost reductions." In fact, the brief one-pager mentions "streamlining operations" and cost reductions in personnel five times and even goes so far as to note that the AI system was able to provide "more personalized service to our residents" than its human operators could and that compared to its human-staffed call center, AI was "improving service delivery and achieving higher levels of resident satisfaction."

This reflects a growing trend: publicly AI companies tout their offerings as a net benefit to societies that will help human workers achieve their fuller potential, while privately touting to companies that their tools can simply replace those expensive human employees. That even the traditionally protectionist European Union is now moving to aggressively embrace generative AI and openly touting it as a way to cut labor costs by replacing government employees with AI offers a cautionary tale about just how much governments may be willing to curtail the development and deployment of AI when they themselves are increasingly embracing it to replace their own employees.