Chatbots counsel Indian workers fired from jobs
tech outsourcing industry has prompted thousands of Indians to seek solace in online therapy. People accustomed to holding down prestigious jobs and pulling in handsome salaries are losing out to automation, a shift away from long-term legacy contracts and curbs on U.S. work visas. McKinsey & Co says almost half of the 4 million people working in India’s IT services industry will become “irrelevant” in the next three to four years.
Indians, like people the world over, tend to hide their mental anguish for fear of being stigmatized. That’s why many are embracing the convenience, anonymity and affordability of online counseling startups, most of which use human therapists. “Online mental health platforms are powerful, and realtime counseling can segue into a solution,” says Mridul Arora, a managing director at SAIF Partners, a venture capital firm that backed a startup called YourDost. “Any new service needs early adopters and who better than young, techsavvy IT professionals?”
YourDost’s founders suffered their own career-related stress on their way up. Despite attending a top engineering college and acing his computer science courses, Puneet Manuja couldn’t find a job right away and was rejected by half-a-dozen companies including Yahoo and Adobe during campus placements. Manuja’s classmates poked fun at him, and he couldn’t share the agony with his parents or friends. Meanwhile, Richa Singh, who later became his wife and partner, was struggling with the suicide of a friend afraid she wouldn’t be hired during campus placement.
When the pair met years later at a global technology firm, they shared their experiences and talked about doing something to help those with depression and stress. YourDost (dost means friend in Hindi) began as a blog, but the pair decided they needed to do something for people afraid to seek face-toface counseling. The pair quit their jobs and set up a digital service that offers counseling from a network of psychologists and psychiatrists. Where face-to-face therapy can cost thousands of rupees, YourDost audio chats cost 400 rupees ($6.20) and video chats 600 rupees. Help is available 24/7, and the startup currently offers over 2,000 counseling sessions daily.
This summer, at the height of the outsourcing job losses, YourDost also set up a toll-free helpline to comfort and advise anonymous callers. Senior psychologist Sushma Hebbar says job loss in the male-dominated industry “is not just an economic defeat, but a status loss too.” Men break down during the counseling, and weepy students berate themselves for choosing engineering as a career path. They incessantly ask: how can I pull myself together and save my job? One young woman who lost her job now fakes her office routine so her parents don’t find out. A male engineer dismissed weeks before his wedding couldn’t bear to tell his future father-in-law.
Another husband-andwife team, Ramakant Vempati and Jo Aggarwal, unveiled Wysa in January. The chatbot uses natural language processing to understand and classify conversations, then responds with compassionate solutions framed by therapists. The founders consciously stayed away from replicating quick-fix solutions offered in self-help books or the therapist’s couch approach. “The chatbot provides an empathic ear, listens without judgment and guides them to the positive,” Aggarwal says. “The conversations feel natural and real.” All counseling sessions are anonymous and free; the company makes money by licensing its AI technology to enterprise customers, global insurers and health care providers.
Last month, Wysa’s founders conducted a quarterly review of chatbot content and discovered that chats related to job losses and work had become the second most popular topic.
Dinesh Kumaramangalam had spent more than three years remotely managing client systems at a small IT services company when he was dismissed this summer. The client’s projects had been automated and his 300-strong team was whittled down to 70. The 38-year-old was aghast and worried for his wife and 6-year-old daughter. His parents who live with him constantly doled out advice. When a relative suggested he seek help through an online counseling service called the Juno Clinic, he demurred.
But after several months fruitlessly looking looking for work, Kumaramangalam decided he had nothing to lose by reaching out to Juno Clinic. Set up by three entrepreneurs who had all spent a major portion of their careers in the outsourcing industry, the startup began offering online counseling sessions to users last year. Its online chats are free while users are charged for audio and video chats. Juno, which is in Mumbai, created special packages for fired employees. Its 28 therapists are trained in handling such callers. “Intervention is very important, or work-related anxiety and depression could quickly spiral into something worse,” says co-founder Davesh Manocha.
Kumaramangalam was angry when he started counseling. “I worked really hard,” he says. “I should’ve been one of the 70 who got to stay.” Talking to the counselor helped him get over his frustration and frame better responses at job interviews. After seven 800-rupee-an-hour counseling sessions via phone calls and Skype video, the engineer finally landed a job six weeks ago. “It is a smaller IT services company, almost a startup, and I had to take a salary cut.” But it’s a job.