The $40 Million Bet: How AI Is Cutting Costs and Jobs at Klarna
700 Jobs on the Line: How AI Is Reshaping the Future of Employment
Welcome to FullStack HR, and an extra welcome to the 39 people who have signed up since last week.
If you haven’t yet subscribed, join the 6700+ smart, curious HR folks by subscribing here:
Happy Monday,
(Yes, I’m late again.)
I know I promised this would be an update about tooling. And the tooling post is incoming. But given the news from Klarna last week, I had to cover this before we did the tooling.
But before we do that, let’s take a commercial break.
There will be another cohort of AI + HR Roundtables. These are cost-efficient and marvelous ways of learning about AI + HR together with other HR professionals.
What’s the offer?
Four 1-hour sessions - 30 min lecture / 30 min discussion.
The online training learnaiandhr.com
Quarterly exclusive live webinars about what’s happening within AI & HR.
Invitation to HR & AI Network.
Read more in English here or in Swedish here.
Or reach out if you want more information.
Now, on to the update.
History is full of defining moments.
Though never fully built, Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine laid the conceptual groundwork for modern computers.
Alexander Graham Bell's invention allowed instant communication over vast distances, profoundly shrinking the world.
The Invention of the Transistor and the replacement for bulky vacuum tubes, the transistor paved the way for miniaturization and the incredible power of modern electronics.
In most cases, it took a couple of decades, but sure enough, all the above inventions have impacted who we work with.
When historians look back on our day and age, I’m certain that the introduction of ChatGPT will be mentioned as yet another defining moment in human society's leaped technology.
But this time, we won’t have to wait decades for technology to impact the way we work.
I argue that we only had to wait 454 days for news that I think will profoundly re-think how we work.
454 days is the time between when ChatGPT was launched and Klarnas CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski announced that Klarna is replacing some of their customer service agents with AI.
And with some, I mean hundreds of them.
And he also clarifies what this is in a follow-up post.
(If you don’t believe the customer service AI to be good - try it out yourself.)
If you have been with me for a while, you know I’ve been discussing a future where this is happening.
And now it’s happening.
I’m not sure Klarna is the first company to do this at scale, but they are the first to publicly state that they are doing it.
They estimate that this could save them $40 million - per year.
It’s not a wild guess that more people will follow Klarna’s lead.
And make no mistake, this is not happening in 2-3 years - this is happening now.
It’s impacting people’s lives - now.
It’s impacting organizations - now.
Sometimes, during the past year, I’ve felt like I’m fear-mongering.
That the pace of change isn’t that fast.
Then stuff like this happens and I feel like I’ve should been raising my voice even louder. Screaming from the top of my lungs.
We, the HR community needs to start think about this now.
Not in Q2, not in Q3 - you need to start thinking about how AI will impact your organization in the short and long term.
What’s happening to the customer service agents will be coming for all who work from an office, sooner or later.
And the thing is, it’s easy to resign over that fact - that it will just happen to us.
And it will - if we don’t take ownership and accountability over where we’re heading.
We don’t need to end up in a place where humans will be obsolete - but if we don’t act now, that is one of the places where we might end up.
We, the HR people, need to lean into AI like we’ve never leaned into a topic ever before. We need to make sure we create workplaces where people and machines continues to work hand in hand and we need to help facilitate this gigantic change management process we have in front of us.
We need to do it together as a community.
And we need to do it now.