Clarify CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski bragged Tuesday that his company’s new OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot employs 700 people — nearly two years after Klarna laid off nearly 700 people.
In a ___ Post on x, Siemiatkowski called Klarna’s AI Assistant work “a breakthrough in the practical application of AI.” The CEO explained that in the chatbot’s first four weeks, it handled about 66 percent of its customer support, or about 2.3 million chats. Klarna announces its new chatbot a News for the newspaper on Tuesday.
According to Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s chatbot scored on par with humans in customer satisfaction and in some cases even surpassed humans, reducing repeat inquiries in 2 minutes compared to 11 minutes compared to humans. And solved the problems.
“It performs the equivalent of 700 full-time agents,” said Siemiatkowski, who leads one of the world’s agents. Biggest buy now, pay companies later, said. “So while we’re happy with the results for our customers, our employees who have developed it and our shareholders, it raises the issue of its impact on society.
Defining the number of human jobs that could be done by AI, however, didn’t seem like a good decision on Siemiatkowski’s part. Fast Company Quick to point out that this is what happened to Klarna. About 700 people were laid off in 2022.which raised questions about whether the company had replaced those workers with AI.
Klarna told Gizmodo in an email on Wednesday that the company’s new AI chatbot is “in no way linked” to its workforce cuts in 2022.
“We didn’t skimp as a result of launching this AI assistant. Klarna’s customer service is supported by 4-5 large global partners that collectively have more than 650,000 employees and thousands of customers around the world. work with different companies,” said Philippa Bowles, head of Klarna global policy and communications. “When one of the companies like Klarna needs less support, those agents are reassigned to another company.”
To his credit, Siemiatkowski also pointed this out in his post on X, though he didn’t explain why the company felt the need to equate AI work with human work or how it made its calculations.
“We chose to share 700 figures to highlight the long-term consequences of AI technology, where we believe transparency is essential to building understanding in society. We believe these issues It is important to proactively address and encourage a thoughtful debate about how society can meet this change,” Bowles said.
While AI hasn’t taken any jobs away from humans at Klarna in this case — it remains to be seen if that’s true of its third-party partners — it still feels a little tone-deaf in praising AI and telling it that. How many human jobs does it have? It can do this in one paragraph and warn about the effects on people affected by AI in another.
As Siemiatkowski said, the people affected by this technological change are humans, which means we should try to act like human beings rather than heartless machines in our responses.
This article was originally published on Gizmodo.
Credit : qz.com
