Klarna CEO Says Company Will Use Humans To Offer VIP Customer Service

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: My wife taught me something,' Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. 'Two things can be true at the same time,' he said. Siemiatkowski said it's true that the company looked to stop hiring human workers a few years ago and rolled out AI agents that have helped reduce the cost of customer support and increase the company's revenue per employee. The company had 5,500 workers two years ago, and that number now stands at around 3,000, he said, adding that as the company's salary costs have gone down, Klarna now seeks to reinvest a majority of that money into employee cash and equity compensation.

But, he insisted, this doesn't mean there isn't an opportunity for humans to work at his company. 'We think offering human customer service is always going to be a VIP thing,' he said, comparing it to how people pay more for clothing stitched by hand rather than machines. 'So we think that two things can be done at the same time. We can use AI to automatically take away boring jobs, things that are manual work, but we are also going to promise our customers to have a human connection.'

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