Either Klarna is really good at pulling strings to get media coverage, or mainstream media does not fact checking themselves. About a year ago, the company was everywhere in the media when its CEO announced that it created an AI bot that is doing the equivalent of 700 fulltime customer service folks.
I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.
I was... not impressed?
Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)
I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?
My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)
I think this is in the broader context of Klarna CEO claiming he had stopped hiring for almost a year because of AI. It was a big talking point for a lot of CEOs and LinkedIn influencers. Big enough that incompetent management across the industry was following Klarna’s steps and reducing staffing (Not because AI, but because they could short staff teams with AI as an excuse). That is why when there is a clear evidence that Klarna was completely wrong, it needs to be talked about.
Glen Okun of NYU business school has written about BNPL loan portfolio weakness.
The AI marketing is just an attempt to reframe the value narrative of the company before IPO. They would rather be seen as an AI company than an unsecured lender of last resort.
The narrative on Klarna’s core business is not good in any case, either an extractive lender benefiting from people buying what they may not afford and charging exorbitant interest or a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio. Neither is preferential to them compared to a value narrative framing them as an AI company. Likely the market is too skeptical in this environment to take the bait however.
subtlesoftware · 7h ago
If you default on your Klarna loan, you could pay them back in support hours:
> The pilot has started small, with two of the new breed of customer-service agents live now, but the ambition is to tap into candidates such as students or rural populations. “We also know there are tons of Klarna users that are very passionate about our company and would enjoy working for us,” he added.
I can't believe it takes b-school professors to figure out that people financing their DoorDash might not be the best people to lend money to.
rchaud · 6h ago
This is the primary positioning tactic used across the startup industry . Uber isn't a taxi app, it's actually the "future front end for millions to access autonomous transport". Doordash isn't a delivery app, it's an "on-demand logistics" platform.
Similarly, Klarna isn't a shady payday loan company, it's an "AI-first consumer finance play".
Avicebron · 5h ago
> "AI-first consumer finance play"
In a more civilized time, saying this was your plan would get you chucked feet-first into a wood chipper.
dcsan · 2h ago
The addition of "feet first" made this much more evocative!
runlaszlorun · 4h ago
oh I think we're heading back that way slowly...
blibble · 7h ago
> a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio.
I thought they more or less instantly offloaded the risk as asset backed securities to clueless people who didn't know the actual risk profile what they were buying
sound familiar?
Freak_NL · 7h ago
They are scum, and currently are suffering from increased scrutiny from governments for pushing their buy-now-pay-later exploitative business everywhere. In the Netherlands they are even attempting to gain access to brick-and-mortar stores by partnering with Adyen¹ which provides the payment solutions, but the government is being vocal about that being unwanted. This is in addition to the unabating coverage in the media about how Klarna is about as harmless as vaping — that is, they are enticing young people into buying stuff they don't need² before they can afford it.
Shopkeepers don't want it, but fear they must if big chains start offering it, just as online shops feel like offering it is unavoidable due to the popularity in certain demographics. The financial watchdog doesn't like Klarna, and is increasing scrutiny³.
If Klarna has trouble marketing their value, then that at least is good news, but not unsurprising given the spate of attention it received over the last two years.
1: So much for the ethical side of Adyen (e.g., https://www.adyen.com/impact sounds hollow when you partner with loan sharks).
2: Some people are quick to defend Klarna for offering people a chance to buy their necessities with what amounts to a payday loan, but that is bullshit. Klarna predominantly is not used for daily necessities.
3: Klarna now has to state that they are offering a loan in the Netherlands where they are available as payment option, with the mandatory "borrowing money costs money" tag-line.
nikanj · 7h ago
Shopkeepers do want it, because it expands their market from those with funds to also those without. Klarna carries the lending risks, for the shopkeeps it’s a risk-free customer base
Freak_NL · 7h ago
In the Netherlands no less than twenty trade associations sent letters to the government on behalf of their shopkeeper members urging legal action to prevent Klarna from coming. Part of it is that Klarna is fairly expensive compared to the common payment methods (i.e., cash and debit cards). Klarna charges a whopping 4% of the purchase price, whereas using a debit card (perhaps 95% of payments in physical shops) costs a fixed 17 euro cents, and cash costs just the costs of keeping it around safely and getting it to the bank.
But there is also the realisation that a customer who uses BNPL today, won't be coming back next month when they are paying off their loan.
Dutch shopkeepers do not want Klarna, but if major chains like Primark etc. do it, they fear customers will start expecting it.
firesteelrain · 2h ago
How is Klarna any different than Affirm or its precursors like Bill Me Later which later became PayPal Credit?
ericmay · 5h ago
> But there is also the realisation that a customer who uses BNPL today, won't be coming back next month when they are paying off their loan.
I don’t think that’s a good argument. For shops and customers that utilize BNPL you are not typically making routine purchases at the shop anyway because the minimums are $50 or more (merchants can negotiate those terms with the provider) but the base tends to be around $50.
If you buy a bicycle using BNPL you’re not like coming back to the shop the next month and buying a new bike again.
BNPL increases sales and merchants really like using it which is why they are signing up for it more and more. Basically the increase in cost is worth it to increase sales.
There may be some bad social dynamics, taking out loans, etc. but generally both merchants and customers like using those products which is why they use them.
losteric · 3h ago
How does bnpl increase sales?
My intuition is it brings in a slight bump now, at the cost of longer term.
The customer can either wait N months to buy the bike cash, or buy it now and pay interest for the next K months.
- In the first scenario, customers can quickly save up and return for accessories/etc.
- in the latter, the customer is playing XX% on top of the bike purchase which ultimately reduces the purchases that customer can make.
It’s just exploiting the “present bias”/time-discounting in human psychology.
ericmay · 2h ago
Your intuition is wrong. As a simple example, during the months of saving in cash, by the time they have the cash, if they even save at all, they have more options for purchase. So maybe they go with the original merchant, maybe they don’t. Maybe they buy something else.
Instead merchants prefer to lock in a sale right then and there, and they pay for that service.
gruez · 2h ago
>How does bnpl increase sales?
Same way credit card increase sales, such that stores are willing to eat the higher interchange rate it costs compared debit.
trollbridge · 3h ago
Merchants really do not want a 4% decrease in their gross revenue.
ericmay · 2h ago
Yes they do, because they don’t have a decrease in gross revenue, but instead a higher gross revenue and smaller margins. But that results in higher profit for the merchant so they go with it.
gmd63 · 7h ago
They might say they want it, but like a wise parent guiding the BNPL spending habits of a teenager, government is right to step in and stop shopkeepers from seeking to cheese their way through business (only in the short term) by relying on a fickle and unsustainable base of new creditors.
Putting a new group of people into predatory debt is a nice way to juice your numbers before you dump your shares, but it's not a good way to sustain an economy focused on producing real value.
skeeter2020 · 4h ago
that depends on the deal. Restaurants don't wnat meal delivery services because of the terrible economics but really have no choice if the delivery company captures the customer base.
trollbridge · 3h ago
The restaurants where I am banded together against app based food delivery. The only ones that do are Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and Subway, and those typically have a 25-minute wait since no local Doordash/Uber drivers live close enough. Ergo, nobody uses it.
The local independent Chinese place delivers and the local pizza places also deliver. (Pizza Hut’s own delivery is significantly cheaper than ordering it via Uber Eats.) Ergo, restaurants don’t have to deal with the rent seeking that siphons off profits, and money stays more local.
In a city an hour away, a local guy came up with his own food delivery service and eventually paid a programmer to make a simple app. You can now order from a whole bunch of places cheap. It’s amazing he’s stayed in business, but one thing he doesn’t do is rip off restaurants.
returnInfinity · 7h ago
that's the short term, if everyone starts to default, something is going to break and come back to the shop keeper.
ToucanLoucan · 3h ago
You know some businesses are led by people not board rooms, and especially businesses that consider themselves part of a community, and sell to their neighbors, don't want said neighbors to be rat-fucked by exploitative financial products, even if it will possibly benefit them at no risk.
This is generally called "being a person with a soul."
gruez · 2h ago
>businesses that consider themselves part of a community, and sell to their neighbors, don't want said neighbors to be rat-fucked by exploitative financial products, even if it will possibly benefit them at no risk.
>This is generally called "being a person with a soul."
Wholesome. So the hole in the wall restaurant that only takes cash was actually trying to save its customers from a lifetime of credit card debt, rather than saving the 3% interchange fee and possibly tax evade?
ToucanLoucan · 1h ago
I mean the hole in the wall burger joint near me that I love openly charges 3% more when you pay with a credit card for the exact reason of not wanting to give away 3% of their sales figure to a credit card processor, since said credit card processor didn't cook the burger. And you can feel how you feel about that, I personally appreciate the transparency and make it a point to bring my debit card.
I don't know if they're engaged in tax fraud though. Not really my department.
I believe in business done for mutual gain, that's how I do mine, and I make it a point to find as many like-minded people to do business with because they're just easier to deal with. I don't feel the need to get second quotes on car repairs because I've gone to the same shop my dad went to. I know the guy, I handle his IT needs. He isn't out to get me for every dime he can, and I'm not out for every dime either: we go to each other when we have problems, and we solve those problems for one another with some on the top to take home.
I'm sure neither of us will be billionaires but I can also sleep at night which is nice.
charcircuit · 2h ago
The board of a company are people.
vrosas · 8h ago
To be fair, admitting their amateur foray into chatbots was an abject failure and rolling it back really does put them at the forefront of the AI movement.
Avicebron · 8h ago
The problem with "AI-first" companies is that they really are just shells for people who want to be "AI-First" engineers, and not "guy who solved my problem affordably and was nice" engineers. The average person doesn't care how you ended up fixing the weird charge on their account, it's how fast and how proficiently did you fix it
cosmicgadget · 8h ago
I liked your comment but don't think the shot at media was necessary. A company replacing workers is news enough and the fact checking need only be to validate that information. The "as good as 700 workers" I assume was presented as a claim, not a fact.
Evaluating the effectiveness of the AI bot is another matter and firmly in the investigative journalism sphere. Coincidentally that is an awesome application of a blog.
AznHisoka · 5h ago
Sorry, but its attitudes like yours that make it easy for media to keep spouting out ridiculous claims/lies, and get away with it.
Shots are absolutely necessary when its warranted. Full. Stop.
cosmicgadget · 5h ago
Am I allowed to respond once you've used "full. stop."?
kace91 · 6h ago
I went through klarna’s interview process some time ago.
I had to go through both reasonable and weird steps, including IQ tests for some reason. I passed them all, and then I was ghosted, and upon reaching out I was met with months of excuses asking me to wait (the recruiter is on vacation, we’re waiting for the new budget to be approved, “I personally forgot to reply”, and a few others). I eventually stopped reaching out and never heard back.
If the whole company is as dysfunctional as those interactions implied, I wouldn’t really look up to them as trendsetters.
DanielHB · 5h ago
Yes they are, a few years ago once got a scuffle with the Swedish tax agency because they were abusing some tax loopholes. The tax agency came in with the bill and they just immediately "layoff" 90% of the contractors working there (a good chunk of the workforce). All so their quarterly statements wouldn't look bad for the stock market.
Klarna is the prime example of toxic public companies
tedeh · 2h ago
Klarna hasnt even gone public yet...
baobabKoodaa · 8h ago
A few days ago Klarna's AI bot lied to me that it was human, lied about speaking Finnish as its native tongue, and wrote me a Haiku about Klarna's cashback.
bornfreddy · 8h ago
That's actually a great captcha - if the presumed human can write a haiku about something very quickly, they are probably a bot.
dakiol · 8h ago
Umm, I think any respectable human would simply deny writing a haiku. So, a bot can simply mimick that behaviour.
dmd · 7h ago
Can, but won't!
lukan · 6h ago
Because system prompts cannot be changed?
baobabKoodaa · 6h ago
Because it's hard to draw the line on which requests should be refused and which should not be refused, because it's hard for an AI to pretend to be human, and because they have other objectives to work toward rather than just passing the Turing test.
baobabKoodaa · 7h ago
Sure, it could. In theory.
geysersam · 6h ago
Bots love haiku. They're hopeless romantics.
abhisek · 8h ago
> AI gives us speed. Talent gives us empathy
Not sure if this is the primary reason. It just seems to me their AI adoption was unable to meet the baseline effectiveness of their human agents.
jsheard · 7h ago
What does empathy even mean in the context of payday-loans-as-a-service? They'll lure people debt traps and then bleed them dry, but pretend to feel bad about doing it?
AIPedant · 8h ago
“Empathy is when you use common-sense reasoning to solve problems that weren’t explicitly covered during training.”
DebtDeflation · 6h ago
I've worked in the field of Contact Center AI for almost 10 years now. Rough order of magnitude you can expect to deflect around 30% of inbound contacts with an AI chatbot. You can also expect to reduce agent Average Handle Time by 15-20% using AI enabled semantic search and workflow automation. This is ballpark, if your contacts are simpler you can do a little better, if they're complex you'll do a little worse.
The problem is that vendors are telling companies they can eliminate 80-90% (maybe even 100% if they can keep a straight face) of their customer service agent jobs with AI, and that is nonsense.
wqtz · 52m ago
Here is the secret rule to AI for the guys who really want to use AI to replace "outsourcable" positions, "AI is a helper" not an absolute solution to means.
I have an extensive experience with dealing with Chatbots and hang out in places where people tell everyone AI will not take job while knowing fully well it might alteast take away the job of starbucks drinker sitting next to your cubicle.
Here is the truth, a single AI implementation won't replace a 15 person support team out in Philippines/India, AI won't replace a 8 person team in Michigan, but.... You pick 3 people and tell them to use AI to automate their jobs.... Now that is how you get AI to do stuff.
AI is a helper. Period. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise. I have dealt with enough support teams to know an AI can surely do a better job than $3 dollar an hour fixed contract 8 hour shift offshore support hand telling me let me escalate your question to our north american team who will be back on monday as my reponse to "Hi" and no that is not a chatbot response.
You get three decently smart guys, and you hint at them use AI to automate your job. You pay these guys the salary of 5 US support desk salary which is equal to 10 offshore support desk salary. Then you can implement AI. You need a human to AI to work. You need a guy to snooze at the steering wheel so when a guy wearing all black jumps in front of your car in the dark road who can atleast come out and call 911. Does not even need to be a smart person. Just someone capable of calling 91. Hear that Uber? What your mckinsey consultant friend from the same frat or you ex-sister in law did not tell you that to you?
AI is not going to do well in full autopilot but that does not mean it is bad. You need someone with reasonable cognition ans allow them to be in full sync. That is the future and complaining about AI won't help you keep a job or cut costs for your business.
---
Now to follow up. When you have established a reasonable framework of AI driven "task execution", you keep doing incremental layoffs. As usual you want your employees to near-burnout. See where that puts you in the next few years
retrochameleon · 42m ago
I think this is near-future thinking and limited to the current presiding paradigm of "AI" being based on LLMs.
Without some drastic breakthrough in LLMs, I believe "AI is not going to do well in full autopilot" will remain true for the next 5-10 years. Reaching full autonomy is a definite. The question is how long it takes and what innovations have yet to be made needed to achieve the first effective implementation that is able to spread widely.
Unfortunately, I think military applications will push AI the fastest towards truly effective autonomy.
osigurdson · 7h ago
I think it is generally in the best interest of companies to overstate what they are able to do with AI. Investors aren't interesting in hearing "we tried vibe coding but got tired of reviewing and fixing the trash code it produced". No, they want to hear "we've reduced our headcount by 40% while increasing customer satisfaction by 60%". Overstating AI adoption and success amplifies P/E ratios.
candiddevmike · 7h ago
I wonder if investors see AI usage as some kind of reassurance that their other investments are going to make money. Basically everyone is lying through their teeth to infantilize investors that they made A Good Choice investing in nebulous AI companies. The folks that don't play the game don't get funding.
kgeist · 8h ago
>While Klarna pioneered the use of AI in customer service
Local firms here have had bots in customer service for many years now, even well before the transformers era. Is Klarna living in a bubble?
cosmicgadget · 8h ago
They are pioneering too hard to pay attention to the rest of the industry.
bookofjoe · 8h ago
Quote of the day.
lm28469 · 4h ago
Anyone with half a brain saw it coming but somehow these elite executives lack basic common sense. I wonder who they are surrounded with to come up with such deranged business decisions
vmurthy · 2h ago
I've been thinking that they probably are smart enough to know this but see utility in spewing such lies. Because optics implies higher valuation. It's follow the money as usual :(
g9yuayon · 7h ago
I'm more curious about how much cost of customer service can Klarna cut by using AI , and how much marginal improvement to their customer service can Klarna achieve. Customer service should be an amazing application to AI: AI solves X% of the problems, and for the remaining 1 - X% of the problems, customers will tell the system deterministically, which means the company can continuously improve their systems with customer feedbacks.
firefoxd · 5h ago
I spoke about this before [0]. As engineer number one in a startup that specialized in customer service automation, I can see how they were fooled by an upward trend. The problem is the arrow plateaus at ~40%.
Even humans cannot handle all requests because some don't make sense or are unrealistic. But at least a human can make that judgement and be held accountable for their decisions. I'm baffled when companies makes such drastic decisions, I'm pretty sure if they had asked (they probably did and ignored them) their AI team, they would have advised against firing their agents.
Even here people don’t seem to realize, or even consider the likely fact that Klarna CEO has been bullsh**ing all along. I read a hugely viral post of them replacing their entire CRM with AI. It’s ridiculous to me people took that seriously!
AznHisoka · 5h ago
Absolutely, people need to assume everything they read in media is wrong, then find evidence to prove otherwise. Klarna replaced their CRM with AI? Good. Its absolutely false until I find enough evidence going forward that its true
rwmj · 5h ago
It's Ryanair all over again. Remember the stories about how Ryanair were going to make passengers pay to use the toilets, or the "all standing" plane (which would obviously be highly illegal, but credulous journalists printed it anyway). All a very cheap, very successful marketing campaign.
christophilus · 3h ago
How is that a successful marketing campaign? Who were they marketing to? Sardines?
feverzsj · 7h ago
Sounds like a trick to hire human with lower salary.
Frummy · 4h ago
Maybe because they're learning from other swedish finance companies, Swedbank lost customers due to bad customer service and hired more people to answer the phone, you know so they're probably watching what works for others in the same sphere
aerhardt · 8h ago
I whole-heartedly believe in free markets, but at the same time, fuck everything about the circus clown show that is modern techno-capitalism.
fullshark · 6h ago
Maybe you should reconsider where your heart lies, and ask if "free markets" that have worked so well for modern society have always been heavily regulated in order ensure they serve citizens beyond capital owners.
treyd · 7h ago
This is where incrementally making markets more and more "free" gets us.
okanat · 5h ago
Our system isn't a free market. With 95 years of corporate copyright you'll have no free market. Neither with 20 years of patents. China probably has freer markets than West now, because since 1950s the West is constantly siding with mono/oligopolies that are against free market. The origins of capitalism is against free market. Neither Britain nor the Netherlands got their capitalism head-start because they let their companies to fairly fight. They created monopolies to terrorize, genocide, and impoverish people.
Startup ecosystem is against free market. YC is against free market. They want the startups to grow at the cost of everything else and buy out all their competition. There is no fair competition nor free market there.
mystraline · 6h ago
Go hack and read Marx and Engels, and also study Ned Ludd and Luddism/luddites.
There is NOTHING special about current technology in application of capitalism. Its always been exploitive, and grinds people into used and nearly dead objects.
The answer isn't reforming capitalism, either. FDR tried, and we're back to the Black Friday set of events... But in this case, we're even worse off with alienation of basically every country as some sort of oneupmanship.
lukan · 6h ago
So .. your answer is to try socialism again?
Were there any major updates to the agenda, since it was tried the last time?
If not, why expect a different outcome next time?
mystraline · 5h ago
Go actually study what's going on in China, rather than eating up all the US propaganda.
What they're doing in tech innovation is astonishing. And you can look at even just something like high speed rail, and its amazing. They're also connecting western Europe as well to the rail system. Look up Belt and Road initiative.
They're also on the forefront in green/clean tech. And thorium reactors. Oh, and fusion.
I'd say their 'try' is doing damned well. Its certainly blowing the USA out of the water. Well, unless you count number of homeless. We're beating them handedly there.
lukan · 4h ago
Oh, you count china as socialism?
I rather meant the more traditional approaches, like the one I was born into that fell apart. China as of now is rather state capitalism to me.
And yes, they are quite effective in some areas. Totalitarism can be. Doesn't mean I would like to copy them.
I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.
I was... not impressed?
Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)
I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?
My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-chatbot/
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42432494
The AI marketing is just an attempt to reframe the value narrative of the company before IPO. They would rather be seen as an AI company than an unsecured lender of last resort.
The narrative on Klarna’s core business is not good in any case, either an extractive lender benefiting from people buying what they may not afford and charging exorbitant interest or a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio. Neither is preferential to them compared to a value narrative framing them as an AI company. Likely the market is too skeptical in this environment to take the bait however.
> The pilot has started small, with two of the new breed of customer-service agents live now, but the ambition is to tap into candidates such as students or rural populations. “We also know there are tons of Klarna users that are very passionate about our company and would enjoy working for us,” he added.
[from the bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08/klarna-tu...]
Similarly, Klarna isn't a shady payday loan company, it's an "AI-first consumer finance play".
In a more civilized time, saying this was your plan would get you chucked feet-first into a wood chipper.
I thought they more or less instantly offloaded the risk as asset backed securities to clueless people who didn't know the actual risk profile what they were buying
sound familiar?
Shopkeepers don't want it, but fear they must if big chains start offering it, just as online shops feel like offering it is unavoidable due to the popularity in certain demographics. The financial watchdog doesn't like Klarna, and is increasing scrutiny³.
If Klarna has trouble marketing their value, then that at least is good news, but not unsurprising given the spate of attention it received over the last two years.
1: So much for the ethical side of Adyen (e.g., https://www.adyen.com/impact sounds hollow when you partner with loan sharks).
2: Some people are quick to defend Klarna for offering people a chance to buy their necessities with what amounts to a payday loan, but that is bullshit. Klarna predominantly is not used for daily necessities.
3: Klarna now has to state that they are offering a loan in the Netherlands where they are available as payment option, with the mandatory "borrowing money costs money" tag-line.
But there is also the realisation that a customer who uses BNPL today, won't be coming back next month when they are paying off their loan.
Dutch shopkeepers do not want Klarna, but if major chains like Primark etc. do it, they fear customers will start expecting it.
I don’t think that’s a good argument. For shops and customers that utilize BNPL you are not typically making routine purchases at the shop anyway because the minimums are $50 or more (merchants can negotiate those terms with the provider) but the base tends to be around $50.
If you buy a bicycle using BNPL you’re not like coming back to the shop the next month and buying a new bike again.
BNPL increases sales and merchants really like using it which is why they are signing up for it more and more. Basically the increase in cost is worth it to increase sales.
There may be some bad social dynamics, taking out loans, etc. but generally both merchants and customers like using those products which is why they use them.
My intuition is it brings in a slight bump now, at the cost of longer term.
The customer can either wait N months to buy the bike cash, or buy it now and pay interest for the next K months.
- In the first scenario, customers can quickly save up and return for accessories/etc.
- in the latter, the customer is playing XX% on top of the bike purchase which ultimately reduces the purchases that customer can make.
It’s just exploiting the “present bias”/time-discounting in human psychology.
Instead merchants prefer to lock in a sale right then and there, and they pay for that service.
Same way credit card increase sales, such that stores are willing to eat the higher interchange rate it costs compared debit.
Putting a new group of people into predatory debt is a nice way to juice your numbers before you dump your shares, but it's not a good way to sustain an economy focused on producing real value.
The local independent Chinese place delivers and the local pizza places also deliver. (Pizza Hut’s own delivery is significantly cheaper than ordering it via Uber Eats.) Ergo, restaurants don’t have to deal with the rent seeking that siphons off profits, and money stays more local.
In a city an hour away, a local guy came up with his own food delivery service and eventually paid a programmer to make a simple app. You can now order from a whole bunch of places cheap. It’s amazing he’s stayed in business, but one thing he doesn’t do is rip off restaurants.
This is generally called "being a person with a soul."
>This is generally called "being a person with a soul."
Wholesome. So the hole in the wall restaurant that only takes cash was actually trying to save its customers from a lifetime of credit card debt, rather than saving the 3% interchange fee and possibly tax evade?
I don't know if they're engaged in tax fraud though. Not really my department.
I believe in business done for mutual gain, that's how I do mine, and I make it a point to find as many like-minded people to do business with because they're just easier to deal with. I don't feel the need to get second quotes on car repairs because I've gone to the same shop my dad went to. I know the guy, I handle his IT needs. He isn't out to get me for every dime he can, and I'm not out for every dime either: we go to each other when we have problems, and we solve those problems for one another with some on the top to take home.
I'm sure neither of us will be billionaires but I can also sleep at night which is nice.
Evaluating the effectiveness of the AI bot is another matter and firmly in the investigative journalism sphere. Coincidentally that is an awesome application of a blog.
Shots are absolutely necessary when its warranted. Full. Stop.
I had to go through both reasonable and weird steps, including IQ tests for some reason. I passed them all, and then I was ghosted, and upon reaching out I was met with months of excuses asking me to wait (the recruiter is on vacation, we’re waiting for the new budget to be approved, “I personally forgot to reply”, and a few others). I eventually stopped reaching out and never heard back.
If the whole company is as dysfunctional as those interactions implied, I wouldn’t really look up to them as trendsetters.
Klarna is the prime example of toxic public companies
Not sure if this is the primary reason. It just seems to me their AI adoption was unable to meet the baseline effectiveness of their human agents.
The problem is that vendors are telling companies they can eliminate 80-90% (maybe even 100% if they can keep a straight face) of their customer service agent jobs with AI, and that is nonsense.
I have an extensive experience with dealing with Chatbots and hang out in places where people tell everyone AI will not take job while knowing fully well it might alteast take away the job of starbucks drinker sitting next to your cubicle.
Here is the truth, a single AI implementation won't replace a 15 person support team out in Philippines/India, AI won't replace a 8 person team in Michigan, but.... You pick 3 people and tell them to use AI to automate their jobs.... Now that is how you get AI to do stuff.
AI is a helper. Period. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise. I have dealt with enough support teams to know an AI can surely do a better job than $3 dollar an hour fixed contract 8 hour shift offshore support hand telling me let me escalate your question to our north american team who will be back on monday as my reponse to "Hi" and no that is not a chatbot response.
You get three decently smart guys, and you hint at them use AI to automate your job. You pay these guys the salary of 5 US support desk salary which is equal to 10 offshore support desk salary. Then you can implement AI. You need a human to AI to work. You need a guy to snooze at the steering wheel so when a guy wearing all black jumps in front of your car in the dark road who can atleast come out and call 911. Does not even need to be a smart person. Just someone capable of calling 91. Hear that Uber? What your mckinsey consultant friend from the same frat or you ex-sister in law did not tell you that to you?
AI is not going to do well in full autopilot but that does not mean it is bad. You need someone with reasonable cognition ans allow them to be in full sync. That is the future and complaining about AI won't help you keep a job or cut costs for your business.
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Now to follow up. When you have established a reasonable framework of AI driven "task execution", you keep doing incremental layoffs. As usual you want your employees to near-burnout. See where that puts you in the next few years
Without some drastic breakthrough in LLMs, I believe "AI is not going to do well in full autopilot" will remain true for the next 5-10 years. Reaching full autonomy is a definite. The question is how long it takes and what innovations have yet to be made needed to achieve the first effective implementation that is able to spread widely.
Unfortunately, I think military applications will push AI the fastest towards truly effective autonomy.
Local firms here have had bots in customer service for many years now, even well before the transformers era. Is Klarna living in a bubble?
Even humans cannot handle all requests because some don't make sense or are unrealistic. But at least a human can make that judgement and be held accountable for their decisions. I'm baffled when companies makes such drastic decisions, I'm pretty sure if they had asked (they probably did and ignored them) their AI team, they would have advised against firing their agents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880490
Startup ecosystem is against free market. YC is against free market. They want the startups to grow at the cost of everything else and buy out all their competition. There is no fair competition nor free market there.
There is NOTHING special about current technology in application of capitalism. Its always been exploitive, and grinds people into used and nearly dead objects.
The answer isn't reforming capitalism, either. FDR tried, and we're back to the Black Friday set of events... But in this case, we're even worse off with alienation of basically every country as some sort of oneupmanship.
Were there any major updates to the agenda, since it was tried the last time?
If not, why expect a different outcome next time?
What they're doing in tech innovation is astonishing. And you can look at even just something like high speed rail, and its amazing. They're also connecting western Europe as well to the rail system. Look up Belt and Road initiative.
They're also on the forefront in green/clean tech. And thorium reactors. Oh, and fusion.
I'd say their 'try' is doing damned well. Its certainly blowing the USA out of the water. Well, unless you count number of homeless. We're beating them handedly there.
I rather meant the more traditional approaches, like the one I was born into that fell apart. China as of now is rather state capitalism to me.
And yes, they are quite effective in some areas. Totalitarism can be. Doesn't mean I would like to copy them.
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