That's still tens of thousands of jobs that will retire without a train-to-replace pipeline. And escalation, by design, is not formulaic enough to be handled by AI. It exclusively includes all tickets outside the normal troubleshooting and maintenance standard.

We'll see an aging escalation base untill the pressure forces a few into retirement, which adds to other pressure and snowballs until we have an entire nation of Tier 1 chatbots and overseas Pakistani call center escalation reps.