It’s been a while since ChatGPT was first released, but it’s only now that we’re seeing its impact in the real world.
Swedish fintech company Klarna has said that its AI chatbot is doing the work of 700 human employees — and it’s better than them to boot. Klarna’s AI assistant was built using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and responds to customer queries. The company has been using it with real customers for a month. Klarna has over 5,000 employees, and generated revenue of nearly $2 billion in 2022.
Klarna discovered that the AI agent was able to perform the work of 700 full-time employees. The AI agent was on par with human agents with regard to customer satisfaction scores. Incredibly, it was more accurate than humans in errand resolution, which led to a 25% drop in repeat enquiries. Also, the AI agent was faster — customers were able to resolve errands in less than 2 minutes as opposed to 11 minutes earlier with human agents.
Unlike humans who have to take breaks and days off, Klarna’s AI assistant is available 24/7. It can communicate in 35 languages across 23 markets that Klarna operates in. The kicker, however, is in the financials — Klarna says that the AI chatbot is expected to drive a $40 million (Rs. 320 crore) improvement to its profit numbers this year.
These are pretty remarkable numbers — Klarna wasn’t only able to deliver a better experience to customers, but also able to save money while doing so. Klarna isn’t the only company that’s reported such results by replacing human support agents with AI — in India, Dukaan had said that its AI chatbot had taken over the work of 90 percent of its customer support staff, enabling it to lay off those workers and save costs.
And as AI becomes more sophisticated, it’s hard to imagine how such stories won’t become even more prevalent. All manner of companies will eventually look to replace their human customer support staff with AI, and save costs. This could mean an obliteration of the customer support industry, which employs millions of people across the world — it’s likely that most rank and file customer support roles will be eliminated, and only a handful of humans will remain to deal with escalations. And while this could cause some disruption, the efficiency of AI chatbots might mean it’ll be hard to stop the inexorable march of technology as it upends the workforce in the coming years.