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Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service
- GreenGames 1y agoI don't understand what Klarna is doing here lol
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- firtoz 1y agoThey went too hard too early
- cmonBro22 1y ago[flagged]
- robin_reala 1y agoKlarna is Swedish, not from the US.
- bookofjoe 1y ago>the word "Klarna" in Swedish, means clear up or clarify source: https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?t=36686 https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?t=36686
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throwanem 1y agoSo they can't be finance bros? I'm not sure what point you mean to make here.
- mathgeek 1y agoI believe GP was specifically addressing the “this is America” part.
- throwanem 1y agoAgain, so? The grocery store on my block is beneficially owned by a Belgian and Dutch corporation which feels no compunction in union-busting. What stops a Swede from similarly parasitizing my local economy?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cmonBro22 1y ago[dead]
- gregdoesit 1y agoEither Klarna is really good at pulling strings to get media coverage, or mainstream media does not fact checking themselves. About a year ago, the company was everywhere in the media when its CEO announced that it created an AI bot that is doing the equivalent of 700 fulltime customer service folks. I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot. I was... not impressed? Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.) I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did? My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done) [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-chatbot/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-chatbot/
- vrosas 1y agoTo be fair, admitting their amateur foray into chatbots was an abject failure and rolling it back really does put them at the forefront of the AI movement.
- iforgetti 1y agoGlen Okun of NYU business school has written about BNPL loan portfolio weakness. The AI marketing is just an attempt to reframe the value narrative of the company before IPO. They would rather be seen as an AI company than an unsecured lender of last resort. The narrative on Klarna’s core business is not good in any case, either an extractive lender benefiting from people buying what they may not afford and charging exorbitant interest or a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio. Neither is preferential to them compared to a value narrative framing them as an AI company. Likely the market is too skeptical in this environment to take the bait however.
- kgeist 1y ago>While Klarna pioneered the use of AI in customer service Local firms here have had bots in customer service for many years now, even well before the transformers era. Is Klarna living in a bubble?
- cosmicgadget 1y agoThey are pioneering too hard to pay attention to the rest of the industry.
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoA few days ago Klarna's AI bot lied to me that it was human, lied about speaking Finnish as its native tongue, and wrote me a Haiku about Klarna's cashback.
- bornfreddy 1y agoThat's actually a great captcha - if the presumed human can write a haiku about something very quickly, they are probably a bot.
- dakiol 1y agoUmm, I think any respectable human would simply deny writing a haiku. So, a bot can simply mimick that behaviour.
- dmd 1y agoCan, but won't!
- lukan 1y agoBecause system prompts cannot be changed?
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoBecause it's hard to draw the line on which requests should be refused and which should not be refused, because it's hard for an AI to pretend to be human, and because they have other objectives to work toward rather than just passing the Turing test.
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoSure, it could. In theory.
- geysersam 1y ago
- abhisek 1y ago> AI gives us speed. Talent gives us empathy Not sure if this is the primary reason. It just seems to me their AI adoption was unable to meet the baseline effectiveness of their human agents.
- AIPedant 1y ago“Empathy is when you use common-sense reasoning to solve problems that weren’t explicitly covered during training.”
- jsheard 1y agoWhat does empathy even mean in the context of payday-loans-as-a-service? They'll lure people debt traps and then bleed them dry, but pretend to feel bad about doing it?
- mrbungie 1y agoRun of the mill corpo speak.
- aerhardt 1y agoI whole-heartedly believe in free markets, but at the same time, fuck everything about the circus clown show that is modern techno-capitalism.
- treyd 1y agoThis is where incrementally making markets more and more "free" gets us.
- mystraline 1y agoGo hack and read Marx and Engels, and also study Ned Ludd and Luddism/luddites. There is NOTHING special about current technology in application of capitalism. Its always been exploitive, and grinds people into used and nearly dead objects. The answer isn't reforming capitalism, either. FDR tried, and we're back to the Black Friday set of events... But in this case, we're even worse off with alienation of basically every country as some sort of oneupmanship.
- lukan 1y agoSo .. your answer is to try socialism again? Were there any major updates to the agenda, since it was tried the last time? If not, why expect a different outcome next time?
- mystraline 1y agoGo actually study what's going on in China, rather than eating up all the US propaganda. What they're doing in tech innovation is astonishing. And you can look at even just something like high speed rail, and its amazing. They're also connecting western Europe as well to the rail system. Look up Belt and Road initiative. They're also on the forefront in green/clean tech. And thorium reactors. Oh, and fusion. I'd say their 'try' is doing damned well. Its certainly blowing the USA out of the water. Well, unless you count number of homeless. We're beating them handedly there.
- lukan 1y ago
- g9yuayon 1y agoI'm more curious about how much cost of customer service can Klarna cut by using AI , and how much marginal improvement to their customer service can Klarna achieve. Customer service should be an amazing application to AI: AI solves X% of the problems, and for the remaining 1 - X% of the problems, customers will tell the system deterministically, which means the company can continuously improve their systems with customer feedbacks.
- osigurdson 1y agoI think it is generally in the best interest of companies to overstate what they are able to do with AI. Investors aren't interesting in hearing "we tried vibe coding but got tired of reviewing and fixing the trash code it produced". No, they want to hear "we've reduced our headcount by 40% while increasing customer satisfaction by 60%". Overstating AI adoption and success amplifies P/E ratios.
- candiddevmike 1y agoI wonder if investors see AI usage as some kind of reassurance that their other investments are going to make money. Basically everyone is lying through their teeth to infantilize investors that they made A Good Choice investing in nebulous AI companies. The folks that don't play the game don't get funding.
- feverzsj 1y agoSounds like a trick to hire human with lower salary.
- mrweasel 1y agoSounds like the human should demand higher salaries, now that AI has proven that it can't do their job.
- iamsanteri 1y agoEven here people don’t seem to realize, or even consider the likely fact that Klarna CEO has been bullsh**ing all along. I read a hugely viral post of them replacing their entire CRM with AI. It’s ridiculous to me people took that seriously!
- rwmj 1y agoIt's Ryanair all over again. Remember the stories about how Ryanair were going to make passengers pay to use the toilets, or the "all standing" plane (which would obviously be highly illegal, but credulous journalists printed it anyway). All a very cheap, very successful marketing campaign.
- christophilus 1y agoHow is that a successful marketing campaign? Who were they marketing to? Sardines?
- rwmj 1y agoThe main thing was it got their name in the papers, and (in this case) their notoriety as "the cheapest airline" was exactly what they wanted.
- AznHisoka 1y agoAbsolutely, people need to assume everything they read in media is wrong, then find evidence to prove otherwise. Klarna replaced their CRM with AI? Good. Its absolutely false until I find enough evidence going forward that its true
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- torben-friis 1y agoI went through klarna’s interview process some time ago. I had to go through both reasonable and weird steps, including IQ tests for some reason. I passed them all, and then I was ghosted, and upon reaching out I was met with months of excuses asking me to wait (the recruiter is on vacation, we’re waiting for the new budget to be approved, “I personally forgot to reply”, and a few others). I eventually stopped reaching out and never heard back. If the whole company is as dysfunctional as those interactions implied, I wouldn’t really look up to them as trendsetters.
- DanielHB 1y agoYes they are, a few years ago once got a scuffle with the Swedish tax agency because they were abusing some tax loopholes. The tax agency came in with the bill and they just immediately "layoff" 90% of the contractors working there (a good chunk of the workforce). All so their quarterly statements wouldn't look bad for the stock market. Klarna is the prime example of toxic public companies
- tedeh 1y agoKlarna hasnt even gone public yet...
- 0dayz 1y agoI remember hearing something about doing IPO in USA?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- financetechbro 1y agoDoesn’t matter. They want to go public and with that in mind will operate the business to ensure the financials look “good” for when it’s time to IPO
- DebtDeflation 1y agoI've worked in the field of Contact Center AI for almost 10 years now. Rough order of magnitude you can expect to deflect around 30% of inbound contacts with an AI chatbot. You can also expect to reduce agent Average Handle Time by 15-20% using AI enabled semantic search and workflow automation. This is ballpark, if your contacts are simpler you can do a little better, if they're complex you'll do a little worse. The problem is that vendors are telling companies they can eliminate 80-90% (maybe even 100% if they can keep a straight face) of their customer service agent jobs with AI, and that is nonsense.
- firefoxd 1y agoI spoke about this before [0]. As engineer number one in a startup that specialized in customer service automation, I can see how they were fooled by an upward trend. The problem is the arrow plateaus at ~40%. Even humans cannot handle all requests because some don't make sense or are unrealistic. But at least a human can make that judgement and be held accountable for their decisions. I'm baffled when companies makes such drastic decisions, I'm pretty sure if they had asked (they probably did and ignored them) their AI team, they would have advised against firing their agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880490
- lm28469 1y agoAnyone with half a brain saw it coming but somehow these elite executives lack basic common sense. I wonder who they are surrounded with to come up with such deranged business decisions
- vmurthy 1y agoI've been thinking that they probably are smart enough to know this but see utility in spewing such lies. Because optics implies higher valuation. It's follow the money as usual :(
- Frummy 1y agoMaybe because they're learning from other swedish finance companies, Swedbank lost customers due to bad customer service and hired more people to answer the phone, you know so they're probably watching what works for others in the same sphere
- tdiff 1y ago> The chatbot still handles two-thirds of all customer inquiries I wonder what happens with the remaining third.
- mrweasel 1y agoHumans, or an endless redirect loop.
- wqtz 1y agoHere is the secret rule to AI for the guys who really want to use AI to replace "outsourcable" positions, "AI is a helper" not an absolute solution to means. I have an extensive experience with dealing with Chatbots and hang out in places where people tell everyone AI will not take job while knowing fully well it might alteast take away the job of starbucks drinker sitting next to your cubicle. Here is the truth, a single AI implementation won't replace a 15 person support team out in Philippines/India, AI won't replace a 8 person team in Michigan, but.... You pick 3 people and tell them to use AI to automate their jobs.... Now that is how you get AI to do stuff. AI is a helper. Period. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise. I have dealt with enough support teams to know an AI can surely do a better job than $3 dollar an hour fixed contract 8 hour shift offshore support hand telling me let me escalate your question to our north american team who will be back on monday as my reponse to "Hi" and no that is not a chatbot response. You get three decently smart guys, and you hint at them use AI to automate your job. You pay these guys the salary of 5 US support desk salary which is equal to 10 offshore support desk salary. Then you can implement AI. You need a human to AI to work. You need a guy to snooze at the steering wheel so when a guy wearing all black jumps in front of your car in the dark road who can atleast come out and call 911. Does not even need to be a smart person. Just someone capable of calling 91. Hear that Uber? What your mckinsey consultant friend from the same frat or you ex-sister in law did not tell you that to you? AI is not going to do well in full autopilot but that does not mean it is bad. You need someone with reasonable cognition ans allow them to be in full sync. That is the future and complaining about AI won't help you keep a job or cut costs for your business. --- Now to follow up. When you have established a reasonable framework of AI driven "task execution", you keep doing incremental layoffs. As usual you want your employees to near-burnout. See where that puts you in the next few years
- retrochameleon 1y agoI think this is near-future thinking and limited to the current presiding paradigm of "AI" being based on LLMs. Without some drastic breakthrough in LLMs, I believe "AI is not going to do well in full autopilot" will remain true for the next 5-10 years. Reaching full autonomy is a definite. The question is how long it takes and what innovations have yet to be made needed to achieve the first effective implementation that is able to spread widely. Unfortunately, I think military applications will push AI the fastest towards truly effective autonomy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Pooge 1y agoI'm convinced Wise is using AI for their customer service. I had absolutely no trouble getting help when I needed and the employee was always helpful, but ever since the birth of ChatGPT I don't even get an answer anymore. They don't understand the problem, and when I point that out by explaining my issue another way they just answer "Have I solved your issue?". Well, no, you didn't; you didn't even understand the problem. The worst part is that they are pretending they are humans.
- n_ary 1y ago> They don't understand the problem, and when I point that out by explaining my issue another way they just answer "Have I solved your issue?". Well, no, you didn't; you didn't even understand the problem. This is a real thing. I had similar experience with Discord support. They closed me ticket or sent me to weird chases(restart app, reinstall app, format your phone!, upgrade to latest os version, try a different phone!, update your appstore!, change mobile operator etc). It was insane and in the end, I said I don’t care and will uninstall discord. Then I get a small reply to the ticket, did we solve your problem? If so, we can close this ticket. And no, I was not doing vague descriptions, I literally sent screen recordings of exact steps to reproduce the issue.
- n_ary 1y agoThis tune change should be also correctly correlated to their IPO delay. AI jump previously approaching to an IPO was a hasty attempt to rapidly cut costs and make the books more nice. Presently, they delayed the IPO again possibly to next Autumn.
- AbstractH24 1y agoNo more CS, no more Salesforce. It’s almost like this time last year they were doing everything they could to lower cost in advance of a now delayed IPO. And now they have to make sure they don’t implode before said IPO.