'Customers prefer AI chatbots,' says British Gas owner as call centre jobs axed
‘We expect more jobs to grow around our digital interface,’ said Chris O’Shea. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PAView image in fullscreen‘We expect more jobs to grow around our digital interface,’ said Chris O’Shea. “What we’re seeing just now is over 90% of our customers actually use digital channels in the first instance, and we’ve seen a 20% reduction in customer calls, so this simply reflects the changing customer behaviour.“We’ve got to reflect the changes in customer behaviour.
- ▪‘We expect more jobs to grow around our digital interface,’ said Chris O’Shea.
- ▪Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PAView image in fullscreen‘We expect more jobs to grow around our digital interface,’ said Chris O’Shea.
- ▪“What we’re seeing just now is over 90% of our customers actually use digital channels in the first instance, and we’ve seen a 20% reduction in customer calls, so this simply reflects the changing customer behaviour.“We’ve got to reflect th
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| Original publisher | the Guardian |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/23/customers-prefer-ai-chatbots-says-chris-oshea-british-gas-centrica-boss |
| Publication time | Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:41:07 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-23T20:11:52.789Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-23T20:11:52.789Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | w9QIliQPhvuS |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
‘We expect more jobs to grow around our digital interface,’ said Chris O’Shea. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PAView image in fullscreen‘We expect more jobs to grow around our digital interface,’ said Chris O’Shea. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PACentrica‘Customers prefer AI chatbots,’ says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre jobs axedCEO Chris O’Shea defends Centrica’s plans as it reports rise in retail profits following focus on bigger marginsJillian Ambrose Energy correspondentThu 23 Jul 2026 12.45 EDTLast modified on Thu 23 Jul 2026 14.42 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleThe owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at the Guardian.
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