When a blonde humanoid runs the office...

Wish a robot could run your office chores? You are so near being heard.

Eliza, a virtual humanoid with human-like self-learning and self-management abilities, is set to be released this June.

According to IPsoft, the New York-based firm that is set to launch it, the humanoid can talk, emote and empathise like a human being, and is blonde, too.

What’s more, Eliza can learn in one day what a human learns in one year and in five days she’s like a five-year-old human being.
Your secretary may be worrying herself sick already.

But more significantly, businesses employing huge manpower, such as information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, are in threat.

Eliza could hurt the very core of their business model — labour arbitrage.

If released in a BPO, for instance, Eliza can quickly learn how executives address queries raised by clients and could even take over the entire BPO with limited or no human intervention, or so the company claims.

“In 1998, when outsourcing was at its peak, we at IPsoft realised that this model is not sustainable in the long run. It is an irony that IT and ITeS companies preach to other industries about using technology as an enabler, but when we peep into their own offices, it is all purely people,” said Uday Chinta, managing director, IPsoft.

“Eliza can replace workers in the BPO industry and do their work more efficiently. It functions in a way where it can reply to email, take calls and even have a conversation,” he said.

IPsoft, founded by Chetan Dube and his colleagues from New York University in 1998, already has in place an expert system-driven virtual engineer that mimics the human brain in IT infrastructure management, an area Indian IT software exporters are keen to make inroads into.

“One of our clients once pointed out to us jokingly that our virtual engineers could not emote. We took it as a challenge and worked for two years to create Eliza. Everything was in place; we just had to induce human emotions. We are basically giving it a face, an avatar,” said Chinta.

Eliza has intuitions, besides reasoning, learning abilities like humans.

It also has a sophisticated natural language understanding and speaking. “In case you get a call in French it can converse and respond in the same language.”

“Eliza is an avatar in virtual technology world and is developed with complex artificial intelligent algorithms and many technology programmes that give shape, intelligence, speaking and understanding, and provide solutions to both technology and business areas. Just like how you don’t see the agent when you call a customer support centre. If you want to see the agent, you have to visit their office, but to see Eliza, you just need to log into IPcenter, which is our platform where Eliza sits,” said Chinta. IPsoft counts Cisco, AT&T and Unilever among its clients.

According to a report by brokerage Motilal Oswal, the company employs just 1,400 people to generate revenues of $700 million. To draw a comparison, Infosys reported $753 million in revenues in 2002-03 with 15,300 employees. That gives IPsoft a per-employee revenue some 10 times Infosys's.

"This model, if accepted, will make low-cost business models of Infy, TCS and Wipro look history," said an analyst, requesting anonymity.

In fact, some IT companies in India are in talks with IPsoft to automate some of their functions, said Chinta. "We believe that the purpose of humans is to do high level intellectual tasks rather than mundane repetitive chores," he said. "We have no intention of snatching away jobs."