Show notes
Episode Notes
Robotaxis can drive. Who lifts the wheelchair? Eric Mulvin runs a call center, and his answer sits at the center of this conversation: AI takes the easy work, and the work that needs a person grows.
Eric is the CEO and co-founder of Pac Biz Outsourcing, a Phoenix company whose team in the Philippines provides 24/7 customer support for businesses in transportation, software and e-commerce. It started as the team answering calls for his Arizona taxi company. Before that, he worked the phones himself as a frontline agent at JPMorgan Chase and Yelp. He's a three-time ASU Sun Devil 100 honoree and hosts the podcast Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin.
Is AI replacing call center jobs? Eric says he just hired almost 60 people in a month. He tells Cody what he says to new hires: if all you do is copy and paste from ChatGPT, you've told him ChatGPT could do your job, so bring the HI, the human intelligence, to the AI. Many of his clients run non-emergency medical transportation, where drivers come into the home with a wheelchair or stretcher and take elderly and sick passengers to dialysis and doctor's appointments. Eric says he sees self-driving cars on his street in Phoenix, and he still expects those vehicles to need a person to load the passenger for a long while.
They also talk about why Eric says many of his clients were 70 to 80% automated before ChatGPT and he still expects to create jobs, what happens when people can't work because ChatGPT is down, his worry that AI gets bent to the biases of whoever runs it, how a photo of his daughter's homework becomes a worksheet of 20 more practice questions, why people working from home still want coworkers, and the 50 conversations at a conference that changed his marketing plan. Cody shares why AI has made him more human. Eric closes with his advice for anyone thinking about starting a business: solve a real problem first, start small and fail fast.
Chapters:
0:00 AI replacing jobs? This call center is still hiring
0:53 Meet Eric Mulvin
2:06 Call centers aren't ready for AI
3:35 What he tells new hires about AI
8:29 What not to automate: robotaxis vs. people
13:48 Can AI level the playing field?
20:11 Work ethic, high agency and ChatGPT outages
23:18 Kids, creativity and AI homework help
33:29 The market for human work
38:13 Why we still need coworkers
46:06 Level up people, not replace them
51:26 From call center agent to CEO
53:38 Solve a real problem first
59:56 Where to find Eric
Guest:
Eric Mulvin, CEO and co-founder, Pac Biz Outsourcing
Pac Biz Outsourcing: https://pac-biz.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mulvin/
Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin: https://pac-biz.com/unfinished-business-with-eric-mulvin/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BizWithEric
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizwitheric/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bizwitheric
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This conversation shares experience and opinions. Eric's figures about his company, his clients and automation are his own account, and predictions about AI, robotaxis and jobs are the speakers' own. Correction: in the robotaxi segment, we put US road deaths at about 34,000 a year. NHTSA reports 39,254 deaths in 2024 and estimates 36,640 for 2025. Contains explicit language.
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