Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski boasted Tuesday that his company’s modern OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot is doing the work of 700 people — nearly two years after Klarna laid off about 700 people.
IN write to XSiemiatkowski called the work of Klarna’s AI assistant “a breakthrough in the practical application of AI!” The CEO explained that in the first four weeks of the chatbot, he handled about 66% of customer service, or about 2.3 million chats. Klarna announced its modern chatbot in press release on Tuesday.
Klarna’s chatbot achieved customer satisfaction levels comparable to humans and, according to Siemiatkowski, even outperformed humans in some cases, reducing repetitive queries and resolving issues in 2 minutes compared to 11 minutes for humans.
“He performs the work of 700 full-time agents” – Siemiatkowski, who heads one of the world’s largest companies: buy now, pay later, he said. “While we are pleased with the results for our customers, our employees who developed it and our shareholders, there is the topic of the consequences this will have on society.
Determining the number of jobs that artificial intelligence can perform, however, did not seem to be a good decision for Siemiątkowski. Swift Company he quickly noticed that Klarna just happened to do so will lay off approximately 700 people in 2022which raised questions about whether the company had replaced these workers with artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, Klarna told Gizmodo in an email that the modern AI chatbot was “in no way related” to the 2022 job cuts.
“We have not made any cuts as a result of launching this AI assistant. Klarna’s customer service is supported by 4-5 immense global partners who collectively employ over 650,000 people and work with thousands of different companies around the world,” said Filippa Bolz, Head of Global Policy and Communications at Klarna. “When one company, such as Klarna, needs less support, these agents are reassigned to modern tasks in another company.”
To his credit, Siemiatkowski also pointed this out in his post on X, although he did not explain why the company felt the need to equate AI work with human work or how it performed the calculations.
“We chose to share the number 700 to indicate the longer-term implications of AI technology, where we believe it is critical to be crystal clear in order to create understanding in society. We believe it is critical to actively address these issues and encourage thoughtful discussion about how society can meet and cope with this transformation,” Bolz said.
While in this case AI hasn’t taken any jobs away from humans at Klarna – whether that proves to be true for its third-party partners – it still seems a bit tone-deaf to praise AI and specify exactly how many human jobs can do this in one paragraph and warn of the consequences for those affected by artificial intelligence in another.
As Siemiatkowski said, technological change affects people, which means that in our response we should try to behave like people, not like soulless machines.
This article originally appeared on Gizmodo.
