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It’s not a secret that AI threatens some jobs more than others. This group includes people who work in call centers. Some companies have already replaced phone-based support staff with creative AI, but some say that in as little as a year, the whole industry could be mostly made up of chatbots.

The bad news comes from K Krithivasan, who is in charge of the Indian tech giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). It has more than 616,000 workers around the world and is the second-largest company in India by market value.

Krithivasan told the Financial Times that AI will take away the “minimal” need for call centers. However, the CEO said that “we have not noticed any job drop” yet. This will change as global clients start to use generative AI. A Gartner study from 2022 says that the technology will have a huge effect on the customer service business, which employs about 17 million people.

“In an ideal step, if you ask me, there should be very tiniest incoming call centers having incoming calls at all,” he told the FT. “We are in a case where the technology should be able to expect a call coming and then proactively manage the customer’s pain point.”

It might seem like a long way off before a robot can easily handle all of a customer’s needs over the phone, but Krithivasan thinks that they will be able to replace people “maybe a year or so down the line.”

Companies have already fired call center workers in favor of AI. In July of last year, a CEO fired 90% of his customer service team and said it cut first response and settlement times by 85% and cut costs by the same amount. After that, he said that the technology would “100%” end copy-and-paste work.

However, Krithivasan said that the immediate effects of generative AI were exaggerated and that people were still wrong about how useful it would be. For the same reason, he said, the world would need more people “in terms of technology talent,” so the technology wouldn’t cause a lot of people to lose their jobs. But then, most CEOs like to push the story that generation AI will help people instead of replacing them and create new types of jobs.

Several polls have tried to guess what effect creative AI will have on jobs. One said that it would take away two million jobs in the US by 2030, and the IMF says that it will touch 40% of jobs around the world in some way. In what might be the scariest poll, almost half of managers said they want to replace workers with AI and could use this to cut pay.