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Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people after it laid off 700 people
(www.fastcompany.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Ummm, sorry but how is this an explanation?
"Why are they easy to believe?".... "Oh, it's just not very hard to believe, they have the metrics, they said so! 1+1!"
It's easy to believe because they are a big company and big companies have metrics?
But, what about the trust part? How does that make you trust them? What part of that is "enough" evidence for you to rationalize that they have a good motivation for laying off 700 people?
It's easy to believe because the claim (AI replacing the work of tons of workers) is easy to believe and out of anyone they'd be post positioned to know how well the AI compares to their workers. So not much of a leap to believe them here, that the AI can, could or has replaced the work of 700 people. Klarna seems to have something like 7000 workers so 10% being replaced by AI, for a company like Klarna? Yeah, I can see that happening. I'm honestly not sure why you are having such hard time with this. Maybe you don't understand those two as separate things, the claim (AI could replace a ton of workers) and the data the company would have (knowing exactly how many it could replace).
You've been the only one talking about trust.
Hmmm, okay, but let's take this one step further, what makes you believe that an AI can replace 700 customer care agents?
I have skepticism about all large companies, especially having worked for many, and especially having seen how far they will go with lies to lay people off. Klarna lays off hundreds of employees as a frequent occurrence.
In my opinion, both as an ML professional and as a chatbot professional who has built such systems or finetuned them for such tasks, it's extremely unlikely that chatbots would be able to replace 700 employees unless those employees were just doing simple zombie tasks.
The only sentence we get from Klarna in the article is this:
But nothing to elaborate. What was the satisfaction rating prior? No idea. So excuse my doubt when I don't want to believe a large company that lives to make money.
The idea of AI fully replacing a large workforce seems to be a bunch of BS driven forth by big companies like Klarna. Others in the field seem to be more careful about what AI can "help in" vs "replace". Have they A/B tested this? What is their KPI? Can we trust that KPI?
I invite you to read the rest of the comments under the thread. I think you're wrong.
Simple job + having ton of examples of it already + it's just another case of automation taking jobs that has been a thing for centuries + predictions from 4 years ago that automation would take away one third of jobs by the end of the decade and so on.
The number doesn't really matter if they're fine with just achieving the same result with less workers (less money). Customer care especially in English is already dogshit so AI achieving dogshit results is not hard to believe.
It's customer care we're talking about. Chatbots have already replaced a lot of it. First they outsourced to the who knows where and didn't care if the customer service sucked, now they just give it to AI and don't care if it sucks.
Okay, thanks. I think I understand your opinion better now.
I guess we disagree here. If the number doesn't matter, then they could just make it all up and move on. Seems like Klarna had no real number to share anyway, and depend on people believing that "it's easy for AI to take over any such job".
Yeah, but only to its detriment. Tricky problems go unsolved and chatbots are used by companies to create a wall between themselves and their clients. Revolut is one example that comes to mind. If customers cannot ever even reach a human being to tell them what's going on, then there's no problem!
I suspect Klarna is doing a similar thing. I also suspect that the worker unions in Sweden will not be satisfied with this reason for layoffs. Not sure if these layoffs are taking place globally or in Europe.
I meant that the number doesn't matter as long as it's the same number for both. They're talking about differences between the two and that's really the main point, whether the AI is any less shit than the people doing the job.
It's customer service. A lot of it has been taken over already and the rest outsourced to the lowest bidder in the third world. It's a very simple job without not much qualifications and it's very formulaic. Only requirement seems to have been some language skills and let's be honest, even that bar was very very low. So AI swooping in and making those jobs obsolete, I can see that.
A switch from a human insisting you reboot your router because that's what the sheet tells them to say to AI insisting you reboot your router because that's what the programming tells them to say, I can see customers thinking it's equally dogshit and since cost is the #1 thing for these companies, might as well go with the cheaper option. It's not like they cared about the quality of the customer service to begin with, otherwise they wouldn't have run it to the ground before this.
Mind you, if these were 700 highly professional workers fluent in English (or whichever language we're talking about) with deep knowledge of the problems their customers face and high social and problem solving skills, it's a harder claim to believe that the ratings would be the same. If it was your average customer service where someone who is paid nothing, who is given ridiculous performance goals, who barely speaks the language and just goes through the checklist without any care for your individual problem, with no actual knowledge about the situation, it might even change for the better.
But they probably are... or a large chunk of them. I disagree with that customer service is a useless job with no skill set.
Here's another article on the same topic btw:
https://gizmodo.com/klarna-ceo-ai-chatbot-customer-service-700-jobs-layoffs-1851293200
Seems like they decided this KPI two years after laying people off lol
To me, it looks like Klarna is just full of shit.
I really, really, really doubt they are considering what the situation with customer service of large companies is. But I suppose without either of us knowing more about the nature of these customer service workers, it's just a agree to disagree situation.
It's not useless job at all or rather the service customer service is supposed to deliver isn't. It's just that often large companies have cut costs so much on customer service that they're less able to provide a good service, to such a degree that it starts to feel useless and something you might as well replace by some AI.
Basically the point is that companies have made it so that their customer service is that robotic and shit and useless that you wouldn't even notice if it was replaced it with robotic and shit and useless AI.