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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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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.