AI For The Masses, Humans For The Elite: Klarna CEO Details Dual-Tier Strategy Amid Growing Demand For Human Connection

AI chatbots for regular folks, human beings for VIPs: that seems to be Klarna's policy, based on CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's recent remarks.

What Happened: Speaking at the London SXSW, Siemiatkowski noted that Klarna has reduced its workforce from 5,500 to approximately 3,000 after AI came into the picture.

"We can use AI to automatically take away boring jobs, things that are manual work," he said. He added that with lower salary expenses, the company now plans to redirect much of those savings toward increasing employee pay and equity incentives.

He went on to highlight Klarna's differentiated approach to regular customer support and premium service. "We think offering human customer service is always going to be a VIP thing," he said, drawing parallels to the way people pay more for handmade goods.

"We can do both—lean on AI to handle the repetitive stuff while still promising our customers a human connection when it really matters."

See Also: Chief AI Scientist At Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Says ‘No Way’ Scaling ChatGPT-Like Models Is Going To Lead To Human-Level AI

Why It Matters: Siemiatkowski's recent comments come after he noted last month that "from a brand perspective", it is "critical" for the customer to know "that there will be always a human if you want." This is a shift from the company's earlier move to solely use AI chatbots to handle customer interactions, which proved to be challenging.

Venture Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya responded to this shift by observing that such challenges could lead startups to "pivot to simply use AI for narrow use cases."

In the case of Klarna, the pivot seems to be towards drawing a line between what regular customers are provided and premium services for VIPs.

"Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them," wrote NYT tech reporter Nellie Bowles. Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, said, "What we are seeing now is the luxurification of human engagement."

Commenting on the intrinsic value of human connection, he said, "The positive behaviors and emotions human engagement elicits — think the joy of a massage. Now education, health care stores, everyone, is starting to look at how to make experiences human. The human is very important right now."

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