AI, Automation, and Jobs

Open AI 1-0 Salesforce? Popular CRM service Salesforce launched its AI tool Einstein all the way back in 2016, long before today's hype-heavy AI market, and advertised itself as a leading contender for applying AI tools to a business's data. Enter Klarna, whose chief executive told a SXSW conference in London yesterday that the business saved $2million by cutting ties with Salesforce and building its own data tools using AI. "Previously, data on Klarna's relationships with merchants was spread over multiple platforms owned by Salesforce as well as in emails, calendars, and cloud documents, Siemiatkowski said at the SXSW London conference. Now the fintech giant is in the process of consolidating the data in one place and will use AI to make better sense of it. 'We counted it -- there's 1,200 small software service things that we had closed down at Klarna,' Siemiatkowski said. 'We can use AI to help us accelerate the cleaning and standardization of that information in order to allow us to create that value'." Klarna cut its workforce by 40% since 2022 with most of those cuts attributed to the widespread use of AI within the company, though it since said it will begin hiring more customer service people, admitting that not all customers were happy dealing with bots.