Over the past week, a slew of headlines claimed Klarna’s aggressive push to automate customer service with generative AI had failed. The Swedish fintech company last year said it automated the equivalent of 700 customer service jobs with AI. And after it announced a new plan to hire human agents, the conventional wisdom was that the project wasn’t working. Klarna’s AI push has been the loudest, if not the boldest, attempt to use generative AI in place of human workers, so a rollback would be a damning commentary on the technology’s usefulness in the workplace. But according to Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the headlines were wrong and the initiative is accelerating. “Our agent, that we launched about a year ago, is still dealing with about 1.3 million errands per month,” Siemiatkowski told me, “which is the equivalent of what previously was done by about 800 people on a monthly basis.” Klarna is hiring humans to deal with higher-end conversations that it previously outsourced, but at the same time it’s accelerating its AI push. When Klarna launched its AI pilot, for instance, its bot couldn’t tell people why they were being rejected from certain services.

Full report : Klarna CEO says its AI agent now handles two-thirds of customer service chats, an equivalent of 800 jobs, but Klarna is hiring workers for higher-end.