Alice didn’t know what she wanted to do with her degree in English. “I never really had a plan on what to do once I got it,” she says. “I really enjoyed it as a subject, so I just stuck with it because it was something I liked studying.”

But, post-graduation, Alice struggled to get a job. Unlike STEM subjects, she points out, English doesn’t “naturally lead into a career in the way something like a medical degree does”; she ended up applying for “almost anything” just to see what stuck. After a lengthy job hunt, she landed on her current sector: customer service.

Customer service is at particular risk of automation. One 2016 study from Deloitte and Oxford University found that customer service jobs had a 91% chance of being ‘computerised’ over the next ten to twenty years, and in the UK, brands from Mastercard to Marks & Spencer have started making call centre staff redundant, replacing them instead with automated chat services.

Alice herself has not escaped the grasps of automation. Living in the North of England, an area one report suggested was particularly susceptible to automation-based job loss, Alice works on a front desk, helping people who “come in with every question you could think of and lots that you couldn’t”. Much of the role involves face to face work, something she says puts her under a lot more pressure than previous, phone-based, roles, and she’s often left to manage high-tension, high-emotion scenarios.

Away from the affective elements of the role, however, and its remit is simple: pushing people to use online services. “The goal is to get people to stop coming in person to use the service,” Alice explains.

She also notes that many of those coming in are vulnerable, unable to do things online themselves – another group potentially negatively affected by automation.

Statistics around automation in customer service, therefore, don’t surprise her. “It’s probably much easier to automate responses and just have one or two people waiting to pick up whatever queries can’t be answered than having a lot of people there,” she says.

Alice’s experience dealing with highly emotive situations will come in handy: she’s spent the last few years retraining as a counsellor, a role she points out is fairly free from risk of automation. “Not that counselling doesn’t have its own elements of automation, but realistically you are always going to have someone wanting a real person doing that job,” she says.

The career change, however, was funded and motivated by Alice alone: her current employer has “never offered anything” with regards to retraining, even after prompting.

“I think it’s more likely jobs will be cut, slowly, as more people are pushed towards online services instead of face to face.”

More training – and more knowledge about where a role might go or how it may progress – is vital, she believes. “A lot of my colleagues are really worried about what could happen in the future... it’s them I feel for.”