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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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[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I guess we disagree here. If the number doesn’t matter, then they could just make it all up and move on.

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 easy for AI to take over any such 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.

[–] 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.