Dukaan押注AI取代90%支持人员；引发强烈反弹，成本下降85%

做的是什么生意

Dukaan is a Bengaluru-based no-code e-commerce platform that lets Indian small merchants (kirana stores, D2C sellers) launch an online store and take orders via WhatsApp in minutes, without writing code.

启动资金：Seed of $6M led by Matrix Partners India and Lightspeed India; $11M pre-Series A (Sep 2021) led by 640 Oxford Ventures with Snow Leopard Ventures, taking total funding past $17M at a $71M valuation.

起因

Shah and Choudhary built the first Dukaan version in about 48 hours during India's May 2020 COVID lockdown, after Shah saw a local Bengaluru retailer selling innerwear by sending a PDF catalogue over WhatsApp. Within 20 days, 150,000+ stores had registered, alongside 500,000 product listings and 75,000 orders.

经过

Dukaan crossed 3.5M merchants and roughly $700,000 in annual recurring revenue by its September 2021 pre-Series A. As users grew into the millions, customer support became one of its largest cost centres. In July 2023, Shah tweeted that Dukaan had laid off 23 of its 26-member support team and replaced them with chatbot Lina, reporting first-response time dropping from 1m44s to instant, resolution from 2h13m to ~3m12s, and support costs down ~85%. The thread went viral and drew global backlash, with critics calling the public celebration of layoffs tone-deaf; Shah said the layoffs had actually happened earlier and that profitability now outranked unicorn ambitions.

结果

Still operating: Dukaan continues as an AI-leaning no-code commerce platform; Shah remains CEO and has defended the automation stance, though the 2023 announcement remains a globally debated case study in AI and jobs.

可借鉴之处

正确的商业决策也可能带来糟糕的公关：从数据和响应时间看，换用AI是站得住脚的，但将裁员宣称为胜利却引发了一场全球性的声誉危机。