Klarna is bullish on bots.

One month after taking its OpenAI-powered digital assistant world, the Swedish buy-now, pay-later firm has launched new information touting its skill to deal with buyer communications, make buyers happier, and even drive higher monetary outcomes.

The app-based AI chatbot already handles two-thirds of all customer support chats, the corporate mentioned Tuesday—some 2.3 million conversations to this point—with the digital assistant incomes buyer satisfaction rankings on the identical degree as human brokers. Klarna, which is anticipated to go public this yr and can want all of the hype it will possibly get at a time when traders have been usually frosty towards IPOs, estimates that the chatbot might assist enhance its income by $40 million in 2024.

Saying a partnership with OpenAI early final yr, Klarna mentioned it was one of many first firms to combine the agency’s groundbreaking ChatGPT expertise right into a plug-in for purchasing. The natural-language interface initially helped clients select gadgets and make different shopping-related choices based mostly on personalised queries, a characteristic Klarna described as “easy purchasing.”

The corporate has continued to construct out its AI choices since then. Its app-based assistants at the moment are accessible to clients worldwide and deal with a wide range of duties together with refunds, cancellations, and even disputes.

Klarna boasted in its announcement on Tuesday that the AI assistant “is doing the equal work of 700 full-time brokers.”

That assertion might elevate eyebrows for anybody who remembers the center of 2022, when the corporate laid off roughly the identical variety of workers, then about 10% of its workers. On the time, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski cited financial uncertainty, inflation, and the chance of a recession as causes for the cuts. He was criticized for his dealing with of the workers discount after he shared a public spreadsheet on LinkedIn that contained the names of lots of the laid-off staff.