I’m a bit surprised that they don’t just skip the cumbersome training part and outright replace all those leaking sales people with “A.I.” generated avatars. Those could still be remotely taken over by someone sitting in a bunker deep under the Apple Donut, like a drone operator, just in case a customer does something unexpected. Like asking a question.
Maybe it’s just me. I can’t think of a more “unpersonalized” way of delivering information than removing the actual person from this process.
You mean like that Japanese resturant staffed by ‘robots’ that are really run remotely by the disabled and eldery? It’s a lovely idea – epecially when one is upfront about it – not to mention that tele-presence is often comforting and reassuring in a way the soulless AI virtual avatars are lacking.
Then again I did just watch 1971’s Andromeda Strain and the point where the doctor of the four asks the disembodied computer voice who she is in a fit of peak, only for a watch stander in operations to answer the question for him.
Yeah, this good part is unfortunately not what Apple is actually going to do, that was just my fantasy. 
Since they started reading my mind I noticed a pattern of doing the exact opposite.
You say that…. And I’m not so naive not to believe it too, but if you look at their track record compared to their rival, Microslop, they have at the very least been able to better pull back from the brink of the AI-slop-calypse[1]
For the non English speakers, this pun is a play on apocalypse. ↩︎
That’s the reason why we should stay vigilant. I don’t expect anything from Microsoft (other than the worst) to begin with, but Apple can do better. Including the treatment of their own employees. I get this efficiency idea to a degree. But replacing humans with the illusion of humans, so you can produce a crap-ton of information, that’s somehow not worth to hire a bunch of drama students… I mean, maybe it is too much to begin with? Someone still has to watch it. (For whatever reason as a video.)
I hear you…. I also know enough about IT Security to know that there is a risk to bring in temp talent like Drama Students to read for videos.
I do not like it, but at least I can sorta understand the thinking that might want to use avatars to generate infodump vids about sensitive topics.
Again, I don’t like it. I think if you can dream up the process, you ought to be about to record your ideas such that others know how you designed it to work. If all the coders document their shit, this would go a lot better. But bespoke undocumented coding has been job security for the last forty years pretty much everywhere.
Certainly valid considerations.
Although I’m not sure if the vast majority of sales training requires this level of secrecy. Based on the article it sounds more like product training (“videos tailored to the products…”), which is already public information for the most part. But I may be wrong.
And then there are NDAs for exactly this purpose. Even if you remove every “unnecessary human” (e.g. contracted narrators), those videos still get made, now even more, and more often, and distributed to more employees. The chain gets longer, just by other means.
It takes only one weak link in this chain, one push of a button, and all of those videos go public. More damage (assuming top secret information) than any chatty student could cause, even intentionally. Hearsay vs. evidence.
About the undocumented coding… yeah. It kind of serves as a “job insurance”, for sure. But maybe that’s just a convenient byproduct. Look at open-source hobby projects. They should be perfectly documented, all of them. 
I’m just thinking aloud.
Patience. One step at a time. Sigh.
Apple treats its staff far better than most. I spent some years in various roles. Started at the bottom of the heap just to spend a couple of easy years before I was ready to try retirement again and kept getting promoted. 7 years later, only felled by a ‘widow maker’ heart attack and cardiologist insisting it was time to put feet up.
Yes, they are extremely (very!) demanding on performance, but I was paid well, benefits are excellent, and when I had a severe health crisis I was paid 75% of my salary for almost 6 months with regular checks to see how I was going and what support they could offer.
During one of the bad Australian bushfires every WFH staff member was contacted to ensure they were safe and what assistance might be needed.
Not at all bad for a company that ‘can do better’
That’s probably breached the lifetime NDA but ‘sue me!’
I read about the approach IKEA took a few years ago.
When they installed a call centre bot to field customer calls, instead of laying off the 8500 call centre staff, they just retrained them as interior designers so they could the creative stuff the bot couldn’t really help with.
Exactly. Obviously it can. So it would be nice not to flood thousands of employees with nausea-inducing slop.