Klarna presumed that AI did the work of 700 people. Its quality is so low that it is rectuming humans

In June 2022, 700 Employees of the Swedish Fintech Klarna were fired. That template reduction was an absolute disaster: The announcement was made with a pre -recorded video, and also the CEO shared the personal data of those employees in LinkedIn. The story did not end there. Not much less.

The AI ​​that works for 700 people. After the dismissals, Klarna made a unique decision: to use an artificial intelligence system promoted by Openai models to replace the functions performed by those 700 people. In February 2024, those responsible for the company proudly affirmed that the assistant “is doing the job equivalent to 700 full -time agents“And they also disregard that” it is along with human agents in terms of customer satisfaction score. ”

Not so fast. Klarna’s CEO and co -founder, Sebastian Siemiatkowski has started a hiring process that allows customers to always talk to a human agent. The reason is striking, especially taking into account Klarna’s ambition in its use of AI.

The AI ​​offered a low quality service. The strategy that proposed to place AI as a fundamental pillar of its support services is no longer valid. According to this CEO, “unfortunately, the cost seems to have been an evaluation factor too predominant,” and explained that “what ends up is a lower quality” in the service. Now they intend to “invest in the quality of human support” for the future.

Uber type structure. In an interview With BloombergSiemiatkowski indicated that the Swedish company is pivoting a structure similar to the one Uber: workers can log in and telework for them. That, this manager indicates, will allow in the future these new hiring to replace “the few thousand human agents” that Klarna Subcontrata.

Labor is sought (cheap). The pilot project for that transition has a very limited reach, but the objective is to attract candidates as students or people of rural environments. “We know that there are a lot of Klarna users who love our company and enjoy working for us,” said Siestkowski. The intention seems clear: instead of hiring professionals with experience in this area and replacing them with such profiles that will allegedly reduce costs.

An erratic evolution. Klarna came to have an assessment of 45.6 billion dollars in 2021, but those decisions made that estimated value a year later It was 6,500 million of dollars. The company now expects to lift $ 1 billion With an OPA that allows to place its valuation at about 15,000 million dollars. The plans of that IPO have been postponed due to the current volatility of the markets.

But the trend is clear: less human. Despite these decisions, in Klarna they create technologies such as AI will continue to impact the dimension of their template in the future. The CEO hopes that in a year they will exceed 3,000 current employees to about 2,500.

We are seeing it everywhere. Other companies have suffered that “recontraction” effect. IBM fired 8,000 workers To replace them with AI, but their CEO, Arvind Krishna, explained that at the same time they are hiring a lot of programmers and sales personnel. Other companies ensure that replace humans with AI It has really worked very well, but the reality is that many are realizing that After using ia they end up investing in new hiring When needing different profiles such as the aforementioned programmers.

AI is removing some jobs and promoting others. The conclusion seems to be the same in all cases. The companies that are betting on taking advantage of everything they can They manage to replace human workers by artificial intelligence systems in routine and very automated tasks. However, those same companies end up realizing that they need more programmers and specialized personnel, probably to ensure that the IAS that do the automated work do so much better than they do as a start.

Image | Anna Shvets

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