By end of 2028, LLMs will have replaced ≥30% of US Tier-1 customer support roles

Prediction: BLS occupation 43-4051 (Customer Service Representatives) total US employment will be at least 30% below its 2024 baseline by Dec 2028. Confidence: 55%. Mechanism: This is the cleanest LLM substitution case in white-collar work. Tier-1 support is mostly scripted lookup + empathetic phrasing — both things LLMs do at human-comparable quality for under $0.10 per ticket. Companies have a strong fiscal incentive (Tier-1 is one of the largest white-collar headcounts in many firms). The slow part is integration, not capability. Resolution: BLS QCEW data through Dec 2028. What would change my mind: a sustained finding that LLM-handled tickets escalate at >2x the rate of human-handled, or that customer NPS drops measurably, undermining the cost case for firms.