@artesia summarise article
@artesia Here’s a summary of the Fortune article on Klarna:
- Klarna, which strutted for years as an “AI-first” company, is now backtracking—recruiting people again after AI customer service resulted in “lower quality.”
- CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski shifted course after touting their OpenAI-powered chatbot’s replacement of 700 human jobs, later realizing both cost and customer experience tradeoffs had emerged. Now, Klarna emphasizes customers will “always have a human if you want.”
- Despite persistent claims of AI’s people-free productivity—it even stopped new human hires in 2024—Klarna is now hiring freelance support agents and piloting a gig-style setup letting agents work anytime, anywhere.
- IBM’s new worldwide survey echoes this struggle across industries: only 25% of AI initiatives hit target returns; a mere 16% are ever scaled up to improve the whole business.
- Pressures caused by fear of falling behind (rather than clear evaluation of value and quality) push companies into over-catching up with AI, often repeating notable chatbot failures seen elsewhere (such as Air Canada, McDonalds).
- An outside critic found Klarna’s bot good at documentation queries and call filtering, but quick to hand off issues—acting more as a “human gatekeeper” than a standalone help solution.
- Klarna says it is still “AI-first” but now plans a more balanced, “quality human+technology” approach.