Quoting TRASHFUTURE:

Klarna’s AI Epiphany

• Klarna, a fintech company, laid off its customer service department, betting on AI.
• The CEO later admitted the importance of human interaction, highlighting the limitations of AI in customer service.

Transcript: Riley Of Lutefisk has gone up on Deliveroo? It’s BCCI, but for buying a shine order. So this story, though, is that if you remember, Klarna a couple of years ago, or about one year ago, was very, very proud of laying off huge numbers of its staff, especially staff and customer Facing roles, because they could be replaced with AI. So in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Sebastian Simitkowski, the CEO of Klarna said, I’m of the opinion that AI can already do all the jobs that we as humans do. It’s the question of how we apply and use it. And by the way, this is from February 15th. This is from like 10 days ago. I think that what we’ve done internally hasn’t been reported so widely, but we stopped hiring a year ago. We’re only 3,500 people now. Last year, we were 4,500. We have a natural attrition like every tech company, but we’re simply shrinking. We have less need for photographers, predominantly the creative stuff and less of the day-to stuff. We’ve gotten rid of our entire customer service department and so on and so on. Now, this was him. He’s doing interviews with Sequoia. This is a guy who is doing a lot of talking up the value of his company to Wall Street on the basis that there is soon going to be not a single person working there except for him. And then the cold and that’s for like a year he’s doing that. And then he does that on February 15th again. February 19th. February 19th. Four days later. Four days later, Sebastian Simitkowski tweets, I have just had an epiphany. In a world of AI, nothing is actually as valuable as humans. Wow. This is absolutely a line that you would say to your wife if you were trying to convince her to open up your marriage. I’ve just had an epiphany. I can buy those hideous Balenciaga shoes on Deliveroo. Yeah. I can buy the Mickey Mouse ones. The ones that make you look at Disney character says, okay, so you can laugh at us for realizing it too late, but we’re going to kick off the work to allow Klarna to become the best company In the world at offering a human to speak to when you contact technical support.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Riley They gloated. They were talking up their book. They were, they were, they wanted everybody to know that they have fired fucking everybody. If Klarna has accidentally cleaned out your bank account because it thinks you’ve bought two pairs of Balenciaga shoes, right? There’s not a fucking human you can talk to. And that was the case for a year. And they’re like, oops, actually that’s super important that there’s a person there that can’t be replaced by ai we fucked up but of course it’s being it’s because this is a ceo he’s like What an inspiration but it’s like oh yeah it’s weird this is coming out at the same time also that microsoft is like yeah we’re not building any more ai data data centers there’s not enough Demand okay okay

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