100 Days of AI, Day 19: Klarna’s AI Chatbot and The Rise of Generative AI in Startups

How is Klarna using generative AI?

There are lots of ways generative AI is being used by companies, and we have explored some of them in a previous post. In case of Klarna, they launched an AI customer support assistant that is available 24*7 and supports 30+ languages. They launched the assistant using Open AI as their LLM provider. If we have to guess, they have finetuned it using their own customer support interaction data set that they have collected over the years.

What features does the Klarna AI assistant support?

• The assistant is designed to handle wide range of questions related to refunds, returns, payment-related issues, cancellations, disputes, and invoice inaccuracies, ensuring swift and effective solutions.
• Like any tech feature, its available 24*7 across all geographies.
• For customers who want to know what they can afford and not afford, it also provides info related to purchase power, spending limits and the reasons why it exists.
• All the info of a customer account is with the assistant to help any questions related to it.

Is the new AI assistant effective?

Its cool to say that we have used gen AI and see the stock pop up, but the real question is, does the feature deliver value to the company. And from the numbers, it looks like it is beating expectations. Here are some of the numbers.

• Two-thirds of all customer service chats are handled by the assistant, which is an impressive 2.3M conversations.
• Customer satisfaction same as human conversations.
• 25% drop in repeat inquiries
• Estimated to drive $40M in profit improvements to the company.

What are the takeaways from Klarna’s gen AI assistant?

1. Its clear that generative AI is being adopted and creating value for companies at all stages.
2. Customer support will get more effective and cheaper. If the new assistant is handling two-thirds of all conversations, it means the next set of companies which start their customer support teams will not require the same number of people in their teams. And this also means the existing customer support teams might be larger than needed.
3. We will see a lot of growth stage startups follow Klarna to boost their profitability and reduce expenses. For companies like Klarna whose stocks are down due to the concern of profitability, companies with similar concerns will start to look at leveraging AI to cut costs and boost profitability.
4. Open AI’s board drama didn’t effect its trust among companies to use them for production scale deployments. When Sam Altman was fired and re-hired at Open Ai, one of the concerns was that this would reduce the trust among developers to use Open Ai to create AI applications. When a large public company publishes such a case study its clear that the board drama at Open Ai didn’t effect Open AI’s abilities.
5. Expect more companies to announce improvements because of using gen AI technology in fields outside customer support. More case studies using generative AI will come from more public companies showing how they are leveraging Ai. This is a function of every company wanting to get a piece of the AI narrative and the fact that gen AI features are actually delivering on value.
6. If you are a company with large data set related to customer support, you should explore creating an AI assistant for support interactions.

That’s it for Day 19 of 100 Days of AI.

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