Marketplace Tech

Since large language model chatbots hit the scene a few years ago, there’s been a lot of speculation about which jobs they might disrupt most. A lot of bets were on customer service. And recent data show they are becoming more common in the space. A Salesforce survey found a 42% increase in the share of shoppers who turned to AI-powered chatbots for customer service during the 2024 holiday shopping season compared to the previous year. But as AI becomes more powerful and more human-like, will AI voice agents become the norm, even for those more complicated customer cases now handled by human agents? The BBC’s Elizabeth Hotson looked into what a future of synthetic customer service might look like.

CES wraps up in Las Vegas this week. That’s the annual convention where some of the most cutting-edge consumer tech is unveiled. And while we still don’t have a prototype for Rosey, the housecleaning robot from “The Jetsons,” we’ll get into some of the big robot reveals for today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, YouTubers are taking PayPal to court. A class-action suit alleges that the payments company is messing with their commissions on affiliate links. But first, Meta made big changes to its content moderation policy this week. Facebook’s parent company said it’s cutting ties with third-party fact checkers and switching to a community notes system like the one X uses. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, about her takeaways from the announcement.

This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced some big changes to content moderation strategy. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp will no longer be contracting with third-party fact-checkers from the media and nonprofits as it has since 2016. Instead, Meta will follow the lead of X under Elon Musk and rely on crowd-sourced Community Notes to provide additional context on posts. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with David Gilbert, a reporter at Wired who covers online disinformation and extremism, to learn more about Meta’s latest pivot.

U.S. ports could be facing another strike as the deadline looms next Wednesday to settle a union contract for 45,000 dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts. A major sticking point has been automation. Proponents argue that technology can make ports cleaner and more efficient; critics point to lost jobs, high costs and mixed productivity results. While the cost-benefit analysis of port automation is complicated, there are places where the model appears to be succeeding, like Rotterdam in the Netherlands.