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Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

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Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#91

Post by [deleted] »

Freak_NL wrote: post #45
nikanj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopkeepers do want it, because it expands their market from those with funds to also those without. Klarna carries the lending risks, for the shopkeeps it’s a risk-free customer base

In the Netherlands no less than twenty trade associations sent letters to the government on behalf of their shopkeeper members urging legal action to prevent Klarna from coming. Part of it is that Klarna is fairly expensive compared to the common payment methods (i.e., cash and debit cards). Klarna charges a whopping 4% of the purchase price, whereas using a debit card (perhaps 95% of payments in physical shops) cost…

[deleted]

Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#92

Post by wqtz »

Here 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

Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#93

Post by retrochameleon »

wqtz wrote: post #92

Here 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 s…

I 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.

Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#94

Post by aspenmayer »

lukan wrote: post #70
mystraline wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go 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…

Oh, you count china as socialism? I rather meant the more traditional approaches, like the one I was born into that fell apart. China as of now is rather state capitalism to me. And yes, they are quite effective in some areas. Totalitarism can be. Doesn't mean I would like to copy them.

The Overton window dynamically shifts between “true socialism has never been tried” and “no true socialist,” but all growth or development in China must be attributed to China being sufficiently capitalist. Do you mean to say that China’s socialism is a mirage, a fig leaf for authoritarian state capitalism in a country that was once socialist, or do you mean that China was never even socialist to begin with, that it was just authoritarian all along?

Is socialism incompatible with capitalism or is it incompatible with democracy? Because if the successes of China can be attributed to capitalism while discounting socialism/communism, then why are we even talking about socialism in the first place, if it’s totalitarianism which is the problem?

Somehow, if China stopped being totalitarian tomorrow, but remained socialist, whatever that might mean to you or look like, if they kept doing the same things in the market and in the party, the US would probably still treat China like we do Mexico now, and I doubt anything would change in how US treats China.

Maybe I just lack faith in most folks in US. Since the “end” of the Cold War, there’s been a kind of search for economic, political, and cultural scapegoats. The potential end of demonizing China if it ever even happened for good cause would probably just cause transference of that moral outrage and social opprobrium to the next consent-decreed valid target for market-validated hate, which in this case would probably be Russia. The problem is that Russia doesn’t have much global economic impact on their own so US has to find a new big bad if China doesn’t fulfill that role anymore.

Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#95

Post by 0dayz »

tedeh wrote: post #89
DanielHB wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes 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

Klarna hasnt even gone public yet...

I remember hearing something about doing IPO in USA?

Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#96

Post by [deleted] »

tedeh wrote: post #89
DanielHB wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes 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

Klarna hasnt even gone public yet...

[deleted]

Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#98

Post by dreamcompiler »

iforgetti wrote: post #17
gregdoesit wrote: post #7

Either 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…

Glen 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…

WeWork tried this and it worked out great for their CEO. They were a real estate landlord masquerading as a tech company. Stupid SoftBank bought that lie and made Neumann filthy rich.

But as you say that was ZIRP when everybody was stupid and this is now.

Re: Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

#99

Post by grues-dinner »

ericmay wrote: post #87
losteric wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does bnpl increase sales? My intuition is it brings in a slight bump now, at the cost of longer term. The customer can either wait N months to buy the bike cash, or buy it now and pay interest for the next K months. - In the first scenario, customers can quickly save up and return for accessories/etc. - in the latter, the customer is playing XX% on top of the bike purchase which ultimately reduces the purchases t…

Your intuition is wrong. As a simple example, during the months of saving in cash, by the time they have the cash, if they even save at all, they have more options for purchase. So maybe they go with the original merchant, maybe they don’t. Maybe they buy something else. Instead merchants prefer to lock in a sale right then and there, and they pay for that service.

Surely that averages out with people switching the other way during the save-up period?

Perhaps for an individual shop right now, in a world where Klarna exists but not universally, yes, there's a benefit to using it to lock in that particular customer right now.

It's less obvious to me, in the long run, that widespread Klarnification results in benefits to any particular shop. As mentioned earlier, having Klarna sapping up to double-digit percentages of the portion of customers' money (it's "zero interest" until it very much isn't, and they're in the "subprime" market) they were spending on possible-Klarnables and a few percent of yours on top as fees is easily a bigger impact that the average losses, if any, from the delta between switch-away and -to.

It's a bit of a prisoners' dilemma: you stand to gain money by defecting (to using Klarna) unilaterally, but if everyone does that, you all, plus the customer, collectively lose money (to Klarna).

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