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Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people after it laid off 700 people (www.fastcompany.com)

submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people after it laid off 700 people::undefined

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[–] snek@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski bragged on Tuesday that his company’s new OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot was doing the work of 700 people—nearly two years after Klarna laid off about 700 people.

Specifying the number of human jobs that could be done by AI didn’t seem to be a good decision on Siemiatkowski’s part, however. Fast Company quickly pointed out that Klarna just so happened to have laid off approximately 700 people in 2022, which raised questions over whether the company had replaced those workers with AI.

To his credit, Siemiatkowski also pointed this out in his post on X, though he did not explain why the company felt the need to equate AI work to human work or how it made its calculations.

Seems like they decided this KPI two years after laying people off lol

To me, it looks like Klarna is just full of shit.

[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

I disagree with that customer service is a useless job with no skill set.

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.