In July, Uber cut roughly 10 percent of its customer service staff. Most of the roles it cut were tier-one, the kind that answer, my ride never arrived. Microsoft’s total employee and contractor count dropped from about 50,000 to 40,000 over the same window, while AI took over routine support and saved the company an estimated 750 million dollars a year. Brinks Home Security shrank its call centre from 800 people to 400 after AI cut its call volume by two-thirds.

If you work in tech support in 2026, that news has probably landed on your desk twice already.

Here is the part that gets missed. AI ate the easy tickets. It did not touch the hard ones.

What the machines cannot do yet

Forrester’s Kate Leggett put it plainly. Almost half of customer service roles will be affected by 2030. What survives, in every one of the reports above, follows the same shape:

• Escalations. The messy ticket that three bots have already failed on.

• Technical complexity. The one where the fix is not in the runbook.

• Judgment calls. The one where a policy meets a real person and someone has to decide.

These are the tickets you already handle. They are also, almost line for line, the daily work of a junior engineer.

The step nobody teaches you

The problem is not that you are not doing engineering work. You are. The problem is that your CV says IT Support, and a hiring manager needs 30 seconds to see you as an engineer. That is where a formal, credentialed programme starts to pay for itself. Not because the certificate itself opens doors, but because the degree lets the person on the other side of the desk skip the guesswork.

Our BS in Software Engineering was built around this exact pattern. Students study part-time and fully online, so shift work is not a blocker. They spend the middle years rebuilding real tools like Slack and video conferencing apps, which turns into portfolio work that speaks the same language your future manager reads.

If half of what you did last week was already engineering, the next step is to make that visible to the world. Take a look at the BS in Software Engineering brochure and see how the online format fits around a shift pattern.