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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 8 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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[–] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 102 points 8 months ago (1 children)

with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents.

zero equals zero

[–] eskimofry@lemmy.world 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To be fair if your human agents are earning a 0 you can only go up from there. So switching to AI is a no-brainer (lol)

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If your human agents are earning a 0 perhaps they've been given too little time, too little training, and too little tools to resolve the customer's case.

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[+] snek@lemmy.world 47 points 8 months ago (7 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] HerrBeter@lemmy.world 24 points 8 months ago

The LLM worked better than the Indian service agent I got to talk to, however after I got an agent speaking my language things resolved

[–] variaatio@sopuli.xyz 22 points 8 months ago

Newer ever take Klarnas word for anything. They are the fine and Dandy company whose business model involved by routine fishing for customers bank authorization credentials.

[–] SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 18 points 8 months ago

Trust the robot. Robots never lie. Also I’m not a robot. Beep

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I actually believe it.

Customer support for cheap companies is someone in a call center in India or some other country with obscenely low wages, following a bad flow chart with limited access and less autonomy. To match it you basically just need the LLM to parse the interaction into following the flowchart, and even when it struggles to do so, you're comparing it to a minimum wage, probably uneducated, worker in a non-English speaking country.

The bar is wildly low.

[–] snek@lemmy.world 13 points 8 months ago

So "customer service" (the bastard child of huge companies and low wages) is actually just a really bad product to start with, and now Klarna has just replaced it with something that functions just as bad? Yeah I think that makes sense.

[–] Noerttipertti@sopuli.xyz 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

To quote flamingo_pinyata: "Zero equals zero"

[–] Mango@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Watch their stocks. 🤣

[–] snek@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I would really appreciate it if anyone could share some video or article or something that explains the relation between stocks and layoffs.

[–] plz1@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

I don't nave a citation, but in general, layoffs are usually used to cut costs. Spending less means more profits. More profits generally means the company looks better to the investors, and hence, better stock price.

[–] Mango@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm only taking about the relation between stocks and stupid decisions.

[–] snek@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Wish I understood what drives the yearly layoffs tide

[–] mbp@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Companies will time layoffs to get a better profit in the next couple months to report better quarterly or yearly earnings reports. How those earnings reports turn out directly affects the stock market performance, which in turn makes the shareholders significantly more money.

This is most effective if somebody's trying to pump the stock value before jumping ship in the most egregious cases.

[–] snek@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Often companies have layoff packages that pay workers X months of pay as a severance agreement, doesn't that mean they would be paying triple wages for some number of employees? Wouldn't that bring their costs up?

[–] mbp@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Good points!

The timing is quite important. Other things to consider are tax periods, bonuses, and nature of the markets. That can all be racked up as cost of doing business if the long-term benefits outweigh the long-term costs.

Especially if they are having a bad year or quarter, performing layoffs can show promise of a better next quarter since severance is basically a fixed cost to the number of employees you have.

There isn't necessarily one size fits all but the bottom line is dropping employees saves money as human resources are always one of the largest costs of operating.

[–] snek@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the explanation

[–] Mango@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

"I decide what the tide will bring."

-Nami

So basically it's because of a fish girl.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

What could they possibly cite?

[–] JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

"I'm glad we could solve your problem. Please rate you experiance with our customer support today"
Closes support chat window
Klarna: "Customers rate the AI assistant the same as the Human support workers" [all non-responses]

[–] snek@lemmy.world 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

@Lmaydev@programming.dev exactly this in the comment above!

When Klarna says "customer ratings of the AI are the same as for human workers", what on earth do they mean?

It also contradicts the experiences people have been having with GPT powered chatbots recently. A model that takes a few prompts to start hallucinating is better than a living breathing human being? Really? I'd be curious to give it a try.

I worked for large companies before, and I even interviewed for Klarna (they have been hiring lots recently, maybe for different tasks/positions), and they always lie. Always.

At one company I worked at before, some KPI was calculated incorrectly and had been for years. When we informed the relevant person of this, they got very defensive and refused to change it. Only our team knew the calculation was total BS. It was become success/money was at stake for him. This person continued to send the fake KPI calculations to everyone every week.

I got laid off from the company where I work with absolutely ZERO motivation as to how me being laid off would increase "efficiency" (even though that was their claim

they are slimming down the company to increase "efficiency"). The company ignored every piece of evidence I provided to show that me and my team are completely overworked and that they should probably cut jobs elsewhere if they don't want all of our data ingestions and ML models to collapse.

I don't think companies have enough to motivate such a layoff if they can't solidify their numbers and make then transparent to the public. I'd certainly like to see the union fights Klarna will have with the Swedish worker unions now. I have never been to such a meeting though, but I've provided motivation for the union to use to oppose layoffs in such meetings - my understanding is that it's a bit of a shit show.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah… we’re having this with one of our suppliers right now…

We’re showing them all the issues they aren’t solving and they’re saying “look all our KPI numbers look amazing”

So now we have to explicitly go into each ticket and mark it as dissatisfied, since they don’t take into account how long the ticket was open, how many meetings had to be called over the ticket, etc. just whether it was closed without clicking the extra “we’re dissatisfied” button

[–] snek@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

So now we have to explicitly go into each ticket and mark it as dissatisfied, since they don’t take into account how long the ticket was open, how many meetings had to be called over the ticket, etc. just whether it was closed without clicking the extra “we’re dissatisfied” button

That sucks. A rigid KPI that is never open to change and only made to show some BLING in meetings, it will always lead to failure.

And when the KPIs are bad, they blame us. We had lots of failures in streaming videos on our platform and it was growing across a range of mobile OSs and devices, and they would just say, very sternly, "We need you to deliver better results!". Meanwhile, they had us do a huge migration and rebuild the entire UI across all devices all while maintaining the legacy systems that are sometimes riddled with bugs. Fucking idiots! They shouldn't expect X performance with Y² the number of tasks (I would have said 2*Y if it was "double" the work... it was more like being on steroids, it was Y² the work, everyone was burnt out, people barely took the summer off). We met those KPIs by a margin previously, and we're not about to meet them now unless they hire more staff or give us more time until their new UI launch. Spoiler: the launch did not go well.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

Yeah, that’s always been my experience with KPIs, too.

It’s always turned into a game for managers - they don’t have the ability to actually improve the product, so the measurements change or they add an extra field in the ticket…

My first job was as a cashier and we were trained to press the calculate button on the register after each item we scanned. Did that make the checkout go faster? Nope. Did it make their measurement look better? Yeah, since that wasn’t “checkout time” in their report

At another job, patches weren’t merged fast enough. So, instead of making any changes that would improve the product, we were ordered to make one ticket for investigating the problem and a second for integrating the fix. It made fixing issues slower, but their KPIs went up…

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You assume support agents don't hallucinate

[–] snek@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

🤣 yeah true

I feel like customer service has been on a decline for the past 10 years or so. I owe it to being underpaid and treated badly as an employee. .

[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well clearly they should've done two decades long peer reviewed studies and even then we'd scoff and say they're obviously corrupted by *waves hands* you know, money, capitalism, you know, the system

[–] snek@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (17 children)

700 people deserve some kind of study at least before their livelihood is cut off.

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[–] Amaltheamannen@lemmy.ml 25 points 8 months ago

Klarna had their best year so far, they lost a record low 11 billion SEK. (About 1.1 billion usd).

[–] mindlight@lemm.ee 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Well...AI's don't snort cocaine so that's an improvement for Klarna....

[–] eskimofry@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nah, they can't claim that until they swap their execs with AI.

[–] mindlight@lemm.ee 3 points 8 months ago

Now, the powder scandal wasn't just about the execs 😁

[–] shasta@lemm.ee 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Who?

[–] lulztard@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

Eurostuff

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