Mind you, if these were 700 highly professional workers fluent in English (or whichever language we’re talking about) with deep knowledge of the problems their customers face and high social and problem solving skills, it’s a harder claim to believe that the ratings would be the same.
But they probably are… or a large chunk of them. I disagree with that customer service is a useless job with no skill set.
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski bragged on Tuesday that his company’s new OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot was doing the work of 700 people—nearly two years after Klarna laid off about 700 people.
Specifying the number of human jobs that could be done by AI didn’t seem to be a good decision on Siemiatkowski’s part, however. Fast Company quickly pointed out that Klarna just so happened to have laid off approximately 700 people in 2022, which raised questions over whether the company had replaced those workers with AI.
To his credit, Siemiatkowski also pointed this out in his post on X, though he did not explain why the company felt the need to equate AI work to human work or how it made its calculations.
Seems like they decided this KPI two years after laying people off lol