In applied AI news, Klarna, the payments and shopping business, issued a press release with numbers indicating stellar performance from a new GPT-4 powered customer service bot over the first months of its deployment. What stood out was a line suggesting that the bot was now doing the work of 700 operatives and picking up two thirds of all support activities for its 150m customers and working in 35 languages. Having experienced it myself, and based on anecdotal feedback it seemed to be very keen to escalate more difficult questions to a human colleague. None-the-less this is a notable signal that the process of automating jobs at scale is underway.
Takeaway: There is no doubt that customer service will see significant augmentation and automation in the coming year. The key point here is that however basic a bot’s capabilities are today, if it is well implemented it will improve significantly though ongoing experiences and data provision. Where once a new system was deployed and would (hopefully) remain predictably consistent in operation, advanced AI systems will improve rapidly, often feeding material advances to the next wave of deployments and so on.
Now over to Exo for a news roundup…