Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Getting AI to Do the Work of 700 Customer Service Reps

I feel it's different with copy and image in copy though there in the llms are much less impressed and I think the reason for that is that at least how the llms work is they work towards the average so they are trained towards the average and creativity is not the average [Music] it was 2010 when we first got into business with a young man named Sebastian based in Stockholm fast forward to 2024 and Clara is a Global Payments and commerce Behemoth Clara recently made its Mark in the world of AI by sharing some of the

results of a product that they built for customer facing workflows clar has been one of the more aggressive experimenters in the world of AI both with external workflows as well as internal use cases Sebastian joins us today to say a few words about what they built and where he sees this world headed Sebastian welcome to the show thank you for having me so you you have become a poster child perhaps the canonical example of putting AI into reduction inside of your business to make life better for your customers and to make things more efficient internally

and so the thing that everybody is desperate to know about is how did you do it why did you do it what lessons have you learned what are the pros and cons everything related to the customer support implementation that you guys have done but before we get into that unless we put the cart before the horse can you just give us two words for people who may not be customers uh what is Clara give us a sense for the size and the scope and the and the business that clar's in sure um so I mean

it basically started as a payment solution for shopping online um often associated with this buy noway lator thing but actually today we do about100 billion do worth of volume across the world we have a half a million Merchants we have about 100 million consumers they can all both pay the full amount what we call debit and they can pay in installments and use credit and it's also a fintech and a Neo Bank in the sense that we have cards does balances the whole thing we are a fully regulated bank and there's about 4,000 employes got

it and 100 million plus customers in 20 plus countries we can see how the customer support implementation got to the scill that it did I think there are a lot of people who have contemplated doing something like what you guys did there are very few people who have actually executed against it and so maybe the first question we'll ask ask you about this is how did you do it like how did you guys get into production so quickly with something that seems to be pretty darn effective sure um so I think you can start at

the I mean the first thing that happened to me at least was like November uh 2022 I'm on Twitter and then I see people saying you should really try out this thing called CHP I tried it out and I'm blown away like I was like wow this is like amazing I've never seen anything like this or at least maybe when I tried Google 20 years ago but this is no this is even more impressive and so at that point of time I was like okay this is really cool but then holidays came Christmas and then

after that I was like ooh you know we have to lean into this and let's see if we can get hold of Sam mman and open Ai and and so forth and I realized that soon Sam is going to be a person who's going to be impossible to get a meeting with so I got to try before everyone else and so finally you know lucky for me I had sey as a shareholder in in both clana and open AI said I was a good opener I got it and I flew to San Francisco pretending that

I was going there for other business but meeting Sam was the only reason um originally my time for meeting was 2 hours by the time I got there it was only 30 minutes left because the secretary was like down prioritizing my meeting uh and I came in and I sat down with Sam I was like I got a pitch to him that working with this European bank fintech is going to be a great um a great client to test open AI products on because what I really wanted to accomplish was to use us as a

guinea pig I wanted to make sure that we would always try the latest greatest and that they would find us as a great client to work and develop things with and we managed to establish that relationship and we had a you know a joint slack Channel start experimenting a lot and then we the second thing that we did was important to me was to encourage people internally to really lean in and try it and originally there was tons of these like concerns what about data what about this so we made sure to very quickly solve

these things so we were gdpr compliant and that we could set the right structures around it since we're a bank and all that and really make sure that everyone in the company would experiment with it and then it just happened to be so that some people were more curious and more passionate and some people were less and that was fine but some people leaned in and it happened to be so that one of the teams that leaned in started looking at a fairly actually complex Challenge in a way which was what we call dispute resolution

and dispute resolution in the bank is basically a customer calls us and says hey I didn't get that package and the merant says but I did ship that package and then we have to be like a small Mei court that basically gathers all the evidence and decides whether you know who has who's done wrong and who's done right right and what are we going to do on this transaction who's going to cover the cost and these errands are very complex they require a lot of evidence a lot of emails back and forth and communication with

both the consumer and the merchant takes a lot of time and there's always been a backlog and it's always frustrating because customers wait a lot before they get the final outcome and so we started experimenting just to see if CHP and these Services could help us make basically like a co-pilot help us take those decisions faster and I think to some degree what's important here is that you know a lot of it comes back to the creativity of the team um and we had a lot of teams in clana some were more successful someone L

this team happened just to be very very strong and really good at what they were doing and very creative and they found and built away what is actually today referred to as Rags they built already back then they realized that would be a good solution and within two months they were demoing internally to us and others that they had managed to build a co-pilot that basically helped accelerate the process and also increase the quality of the decision- making because it was it was making sure that we actually really you know took in all the irrelevant

information and then took a decision on these disputes and we said look this is amazing let's put it in production um so far just as a co-pilot and then the team you know which was crazy like two months later we suddenly get this slack message in tally which says um we're out of errands can you send us more tickets and um that's never happened like this has been a constant backlog was just like this is really impressive and then we said look it's be crazy to try to see how we could you know um increase

the pace of this and actually even answer customer service erand and uh and that was that and then that team went on that challenge I think to us what was most critical was one of the rules that we agreed on was that the customer should always know if they speak to AI or if they speak to human M um and that's been important but when we wanted to start testing this we had a bug and the bug was that for a few thousand conversations it wasn't clear that it was Ai and when we then looked

at the which was you know not intended but the conclusion was we could read a few thousand transcripts of conversations where the human wasn't a the customer wasn't aware that it was AI answering and we realized that the AI was doing heck of a good job and that made us conclude that it's the most important thing to us was that customer satisfaction would be equal or greater than um what um you know it it was with a human agent and as we saw that we started reach that point um then it became we became less

nervous about putting this into real production and actually try it right so I think that like you know it was really the effort of that amazing team that kind of tested and iterated and let a few you know lucky shots that along the way that then allowed us to put it into production amazing um there are so many questions that we want to ask to follow up on this so maybe we'll start with you mentioned that rag is part of the architecture can you say a few more words about the implementation itself and sort of

where does open AI end and Clara begin in terms of what you guys have built on top to make this work well I think that the uh I it's funny cuz in general I'm always so freaking transparent and this is one time in my life that I actually feel a bit Cy about telling too much about the secret sauce um because I actually think about this as a fairly uh important strategic Advantage but um what I can say is that in in our case um one of the key elements was that like it's about making

sure that the instructions are clear if you um if you on board a human and you ask a random human to sit in our customer service and try to answer a question and the documentation that's available to that human is subpar uh because there's an assumption that you can rely on what people have learned in different sessions or assumptions um you're not going to be successful but if youve written a documentation that is detailed enough so you could even if very slowly put any random individual and they could slowly go through your FAQ and manuals

actually answer a question correctly because it was uh documented at level detail then it works and that's how I think about the AI today it's basically an employee that turns out that the work every day and has forgotten everything about what CL is how it works and those that and every time you need to tell it again um and that may change over time but currently that's partially the game and then so that that helped us a lot to think about it that way that we just needed to make sure that the documentation and the

manuals were clear enough and of quality enough and then it can actually execute because many times you know if you it's I mean the the the truth that has been the truth for data scientists for a long period of time in out right like if you if you feed data mods with bad things you're going to get bad results right so you need to make sure what you feed in is good and then you can get better outcomes Sebastian you I think you tweeted that uh your customer support agent is now handling two-thirds of your

customer service inquiries y um you got a question from your audience on Twitter this week uh are you planning to replace your CS Department 100% uh with AI I guess from a technological perspective do you think that's possible on what time span and and what are your plans well I mean it's very hard obviously to predict how far will ai go and what can we do in the future and so forth but I think that the it's definitely not going to happen anytime soon and I do think that there will be customers that prefer a

human for you know could be for any reason could be because they have such a belief or you know conviction or preference or whatever and obviously you want to serve those customers as well so there's no chance that you know the human agents are going away anytime soon um with that said though I think actually the biggest quality improvement that we see is that um generally speaking and obviously we as every other companies to some degree want to avoid this but it's not uncommon that our human agents have multiple chats going on H so so

and we as customers all know that because you go and chat and you're like you write a question and you don't get the answer immediately and you're a little bit like come on and they forgot about you and they was like hello John where are you like why you not answering and they're like oh I'm you know and so forth and and I would understand because I I you know when I have tried to work in customer service myself I did the same thing like you know it's like it doesn't make sense because you also

sometimes the customer is slow and not answering and so forth so you start doing something else you can't just sit and idle and wait for that you want to you know resolve more things so you get it but the consequence of that is that the average time of resolution of a uh customer service chat is about 14 minutes and when we move to AI it's 2 minutes and the reason of that is because you get instant response as a customer uh as opposed to that delay that happens due to that um parallel handling of errand

and um this is actually the biggest advantage and so as a customer a lot of customers that try that say wow I want this experience but at the same prot time we have something else which is funny which is that AI chatbots have been around for 10 years or something and they all been of horrible quality so each one of us have gone to some Airline and tried to converse about some tickets and been like my God this is the dumbest thing I've ever talked to and so the funny thing is that of those 30%

currently that do not use our AI chatbot the most common reason is they when we start the conversation with them the first thing they write is Agent right agent which basically means they want to speak to a human and that's not necessarily because they so deeply want to speak to a human as some of them are so but a lot of others is just because they had these horrible experiences and they want to avoid it they just don't trust it to be good and so actually what I'm seeing is that what's happening right now is

a time well it will take some time to educate customers on the fact that like you know what but this experience is actually many times better and a lot of the people that tried it they want to use it more because they find it more you know faster um and I think that's the that takes a little bit longer time right there's the actual experience but then there's the perception expectation of what the experience going to look like and changing that takes a bit longer than changing the experience itself so I suspect we're going to

see higher even higher proportion of things dealt with AI but there's obviously a lot of complex queries that it doesn't resolve well today and that still needs to be improved on and there's still tons of work to be done right what are the tradeoffs are there ways in which it is consistently worse than what you had before um I actually no but it's not entirely as I said that is not entirely due to the fact that um of AI that is partly due to the fact that some of the instructions that or manuals that were

written to help our human agents were subpar and the experience already before suffered from that but not enough managerial attention and focus was put to improving that and helping our agents become better at work so actually our agents have better tools today to be successful in helping the customers as does the AI so the consequences both experiences are improving as a consequence of that but you know so I think that like partially it's true that like things will be worse like yeah no I think both sides get better by doing this actually because just you

realize the importance of these things and I think sometimes to some degree previously you just you know there wasn't enough focus on the topic yeah that's great and you mentioned the 14 minutes down to two minutes so there other statistics you can share that help to kind of illustrate the impact of this well I think the one that we were most famously you know quoted on was obviously that 700 full-time in place but I think that one and we were very you know I it's a difficult number to share and I understand like you know

we understood that people would react to it but at the same part time I also feel to some degree that like politicians are too slow on considering and thinking proactively what this is going to how this is going to impact society and we felt that there's some level of importance of sharing such statistics to kind of a little bit say look this isn't just fun demos on Twitter this is actually having real life business and real life implications now with that said in our case we have been using um customer service on Contracting firms those

firms employ hundreds of thousands of people and if we historically have improved our products somehow that may also have led to Less customer service errand because you know we fix some issue or flow in the product but obviously I've never seen an improvement to our product that at a push of a button had this tramatic impact on number of customer service agents that we need and now fortunately for those agents there are tons of other customers out there so nobody has lost their job as of today as far as I know at least as consequence

of this but obviously in the longer term it will have implications on these kind of jobs but that was the statistic that a lot of people obviously reacted to um and the fact that it's about $40 million of improved profitability for the company on an annual basis right so is fairly significant I mean we do about $2 billion of Revenue so gives you kind of a sense for the size awesome and and since you've been thoughtful about kind of the broader societal or economic impacts of this technology I'm curious if you you know if you

had a magic wand and you could craft a policy or or procedure that would help get us through what's likely to be an era of disruption do you have any thoughts on what you would do with that magic wand policies programs you'd put in place the first thing that I think is super critical is actually may sound a bit surprising but it's an electronic identification methodology for humans currently there's no globally applied such methodology just like a passport but an electronic one and why that is so critical is because the amount of Fraud and scams

you're going to see increase is due to the fact that I have no there's no ability for you Pat and Sonia right now to ask me for my electronic identification to verify that I am not a uh a bot or I'm not some you know what's called um uh fake uh um you know video created or pretending to be an AI you know not an AI talking to you is actually the human right and I think being able to verify that you are talking to the real human is critical if we can supply uh that

on a global level but preferably even on a country level that will at least reduce the risk of Fraud and so forth because you'll be able to authenticate like am I talking to pad the real Pat or am I talking to your Bot right like I want to be able to know about so that is very critical I think that needs to be resolved fairly quickly because otherwise we're just going to see an explosion as these I mean I have seen videos of myself talking to customers that we have produced that look identically to me

sound like me uh well you know which have been or we are about to send out to over 1,000 of our top Merchants um and so like it is crazy to see those avatars you know and being able to impersonate myself so I think that's that's one thing the second thing though is if you're left leaning I hear people on the left side of the political Spectra they are saying like stop this stop the progress I I have a hard time especially considering that there are less democratical countries in the world that may you know

push this agenda as well and so I think that's not necessarily the best outcome but if you're on the rightwing of the political Spectre a lot of people say oh don't worry there's going to be new jobs there's always new jobs this happens all the time there's always new jobs and I think that's a little bit of a simplification as well when I was in Brussels there are I think if I remember correctly 10,000 translators that are employed in Brussels to translate all the European legislation into the local languages of Europe those 10,000 translators are

basically almost redundant today with the technology of deepal and CHP and so forth to some degree right I mean you could at least reduce it dramatically um and I don't think it's easy to say to a 55-year-old translator don't worry you're going to become a YouTube influencer so I think that what you can do from a society political perspective is you could think about okay maybe I don't want to stop progress but maybe I can offer something to people being effective right like maybe I can offer something to them maybe Society can have the luxury

of at least support individuals that are affected by these changes because not everyone will be able to just retrain into something different and I think it's in that vicinity and I hope if if there would be such measures or at least plans or ideas among politicians then maybe you can take Society through this change with a little bit more of empathy and care about the people are you know um who are affected while at the same time not saying that we have to stop progress right yeah yeah thank you for being so thoughtful about it

it's it's encouraging to see people in leadership positions like yours being so thoughtful thank you Sebastian what types of jobs do you think are going to be most affected and and what type of jobs do you think will be you know what what what skills are you teaching your kids to learn uh so that their future livelihoods are are AI aligned so to speak um yeah so I think that like it's funny you say that cuz when I met Sam back then and I got that meeting I said to him look Sam one thing that's

going to happen is people will this is going to have impact on jobs so I think if you want to make this a very popular technology you should identify like what are the job categories that people hate the most and you know I happen to have two of the three three ones because I'm both a CEO and I'm both a banker and those are two of the ones and then you have the only the lawyers right so those are the three ones so I said to like what you should focus on try to build AI

that replaces CEOs bankers and lawyers and nobody will make a big fuss about it um unfortunately you know and I saw that very clearly because when you know when we did a tweet later on about the marketing things we're doing about AI where we have less need for uh photographers and and such copyist and things less needs we still need them but we need them predominantly for the very creative stuff and less for the kind of day-to-day stuff um that had a violent reaction online and I can understand why um because people you know really

feel emotionally resonate a lot to that while when you see online tweets about AI lawyers nobody seems to react much so I feel feel sad for the lawyers in the world I hope you you know people remember you as well lley but anyways you know it's scary right it's scary because I don't know I I I I find it it's a very difficult question to answer um I just I mean to some degree uh definitely physical jobs right like I mean I it just looks currently as on the very long-term perspective it's going to be

easier to replace knowledge jobs than it's going to be to replace you know um driving a truck or even though we were so convinced about self-driving cars and all that um or you know proper robots seems a little bit further out than you know AI so it's difficult um but that also assumes that everyone wants to work I'm not sure like some people would like work some people would enjoy a society in which robots serve us and we just you know hang out and play football so like it's a little bit you know it depends

like it's hard to predict where all all of this is going to go right I preferably love work so I will be one of the depressed people when AI takes my job and I'm going to sit and like and be like okay that was the end of the fun because I really enjoy it a lot but like you know people are different everyone's different right yeah let's talk about some more of the stuff that you guys have built internally so so you've mentioned a little bit what you guys have done in marketing can you say

more about that yeah I mean it's it's been very interesting as well I mean because again there's so many demos right and it's like it's you I mean I think everyone has tried and you gone you know tried to create an image or create a video and you are blown away first with what you can do but then you're like yeah but I wanted to look like exactly like this and I wanted to be consistent with my brand feeling and I wanted to you know Etc and then you start being more challenged with it right

like and I think that's why also sometimes I feel a little bit like for example you know people say like oh it's unfair to the creators um that these tools are being created in in marketing so forth and I I partially understand why people say that but at the same point of time we have this guy who has totally immersed himself in this video You Know video creation sound creation um marketing creating things and and created this amazing basically just scripted together a lot of these different Technologies to create like these automatic marketing videos with

me making presentation to Merchants as an example me as an avatar and like and it's really nice it looks really great it's on brand and so forth he is a Creator he is extremely creative and it's a little bit like I can I can assume that when you know when the music industry evolved and synthesizers came along and computers to make music you know some people were like complaining that's not playing a guitar that's not creative you're sitting by a freaking computer nobody would say that anymore but I'm sure there was a lot of that

criticism to some degree I feel the people that are adopting these Technologies today they are just they're very creative uh but they're using new tools to be able to create what they see in their minds and so you know I think that's what I'm seeing so we are basically having people people who may not themselves be photographers or who may not themselves be great at Photoshop or who may not themselves be great at all these things but now with text and communication with the computers they can create what's in their minds and they can explore

ideas and concepts of marketing campaigns of marketing material of doing things in a way that was unprecedented before right like and that's really exciting and they obviously there's yeah it's true there's less people involved right like um there less people involved because previously if you wanted to produce a commercial you know there are tons of people involved and some of that is beneficial because you have you know different people coming with ideas and thoughts but some of it is also less beneficial because you have a a few people who have this amazing idea but they're

not capable of turning that idea into the reality because they themselves aren't the photographer and they're themselves not all of this and now they can actually bring their ideas to life at a different level than they could before so uh but that those are the things that we cannot doing a lot of that is just like how do we go from you know um basically we want to Market our credit card in Germany and like how do we go from that to actually having a campaign live that looks really great uses the right copy Etc

and we have seen that we have already seen internal examples where something like that historically may have taken a month or two months to prepare and go through different teams and improvements you also have to remember as a Bank we need to make sure that we are communicating in a regulatory compliant way because credit cards are regulated products so there's like tons of complexity associated with these things and nowadays we can see a few individuals go from idea to actually having a marketing campaign live in a week or in you know in at a time

frame that was impossible historically um and the quality of the campaign is higher and the you know and and the lawfulness of it is better and you know all all things are better Sebastian you're a creative soul and an artist and I think the Clara brand has always been just so special like quirky Vivid creative all of that um what do you think of the quality of the the AI generated creative copy and like what what do you think can be outsourced today and then Ai and and what can't and do you still prefer uh

you know the you know the gorgeous photo shoots that you all do in the house uh it's a good question I feel it's different with copy and image I in my opinion when I look at the imagery I feel it's more fun because it can be to some degree more crazy and imaginary um so there I see less but in copy though they're in the llms are much less impressed and I think the reason for that is that at least how the llms work is they work towards the average so they are trained towards the

average and creativity is not the average creativity the extreme of recognizing that this is a total new way or a new way to combine things and stuff like that and that's why I still think that for some period of time creativity will out compete you know these things that and that's what I mean like it's one thing if I want to write you know if I need to write a text about a product like we have obviously we we have a price uh sorry a product comparison website where you know we have millions of products

listed right like clothing iPhones whatever and we need descriptions right for those cases llms are great um and they're very efficient and stuff like that but when you want that perfect quiry copy that's going to catch the attention of you know of a human audience and you know they're going to talk about it and thought that was funny or something much worse like well you can obviously generate fast a lot of versions but I still feel that like it's pushing towards the average and the average is not creative sorry like the average is the average

which is the average it just doesn't stand stand out much right so there I still feel that like humans are much better at that of of thinking outside of the box so to speak because the llms are almost like thinking in the box like that that's that's basically what they do they're supposed to think in the box right like according to the box that's such a fascinating dichotomy thanks for sharing um can you tell us about uh Kiki I think is what it's called yeah so I think for for clana at least it happened to

be so that coinciding with the with the um um with the AI Revolution uh we also started obsessing about the concept of collaboration on information and it's actually also one of the Technologies we've started using extensively inhouse is Neo forj and GRS which we didn't really explore much beforehand and we've also looked a lot to like Wikipedia and other knowledge graphs and and how people have built you know how people collaborate on building great information and um so a big initiative internally has been to start bringing together information that are sitting in silos across multiple

systems and improving the quality of that and really creating collaboration which actually has the side effect of us also deprecating Salesforce uh deprecating a lot of enterprise software systems because we move that data into one I'm not saying I mean for example slack we're great users of so we're still big customers of Salesforce because of slack instead but like but some of that t like we've had too many of these enterprise software systems and as a consequence information about what we do and how we work is dispersed and it's inconsistent and um so a big

piece has been bringing that together standardizing and harmonizing that and then on top of that we have Kiki who then explores that information and brings it to life so we can go and ask Kiki about anything about you know how many employees are we in that part or what does this part what does this team work on or you know what's important to consider or when you launch a system internally what are the steps that you're going to go through and all of that is getting centralized into one place and connected through the knowledge graph

we're seeing that that is having a tremendous impact on productivity uh internally so Kiki is basically our own internal chatbot based on that growing internal Knowledge Graph how how and where does Ki show up for employees is it is it a is it a slack pot like where do people interact with it both in slack but also like we have something that looks like a Wikipedia kind of the knowledge graph when you look at it looks like a Wikipedia basically for RM pleas and you can both kind of read the articles themselves but you can

also interact with Kiki to find information in that right uh so it's a combination of semantic search and and AI uh to interpret the the information in that and that has proven to work really well like um it hasn't a tremendous adoption internally and I think it's created tons of value for us so we're very key very excited about that and the account on deprecating Salesforce is really interesting I can see how the system of record functionality can get replaced for the system of Engagement functionality the workflows that people might have been doing on top

of Salesforce where have those gone how how do people whatever jobs to be done there were on top of Salesforce previously how are people doing those jobs now um a mix of things actually but it's less about like I think it's less about the fact so some of this is actually as simple as slack flow slack workflow actually the the workflows in Slack are pretty good so we you could just joke at us and laugh at us that you just just moved from one propriety system to another but I think that the but it's not

about that it's the number of such Sy right because I want people at CLA to collaborate genuinely and one of the things that been so revealing throughout this process is that whenever people have a new system a new place to go and look for information it all creates these silos and it it reduces the ability for us to collaborate across the organization on information and providing value so just REM removing the number of systems is important right to have fewer and more quality and stand standard across the organization so so some of those workflows are

implemented directly in our own Tex Tack and some of those workflows we're still using proprietary system for like I mean we're for example moving our HRS out of workday uh into deal uh which with great success it's not like we're entitled but we are reshaping it we're we're using only the payroll stuff and we are also within a few weeks deprecating workday as also because there was also too much information there that was important like think about for us understanding the organization and how it's tied together if we're ever going to get Kiki and our

internal Knowledge Graph to function properly the understanding of our organization the teams the reporting lines is important so that could not sit in a proprietary system that needs to come inhouse um but obviously generating payroll and making sure we pay pay on salary on time and so forth that where are a happy customer of deal nowadays so like so it's just been a change in our TCH stack Sebastian how do you think about buy versus build decisions for you know you have ai for customer support you have ai for your knowledge graph you have ai

for marketing each of these categories now has you know companies and vendors serving them like Sierra and and gleen and and companies like that I realized that you know you kind of built what you had you know before these Solutions existed but I guess if you were to start over um from scratch today um or or what advice would you give other other Founders who are just kind of embarking on this journey should they buy or should they build it's a great question and it's one obviously we ask ourselves all the time but I have

to say I give you an example right when when we started um encouraging people in clana to use AI we didn't mandate them to do things that was core for the business we said take the idea that you're passionate about and explore it and one of the examples that we built early days was we said look one of the things that we hate in a big company is these Employee Engagement forms cuz they go like hey how are you feeling at CLA great on a scale one to five you know and then we're sitting and

trying to interpret the answers to these forms and we felt it was a very in precise and open for a lot of you know interpretation and subjectivity so we said it's not a great way so we said like hey wouldn't it be fun if like we could do a deep interview with every employee right but maybe we can't do it maybe the AI can do it and so we built that we built a deep interview robot based on chip that we then deployed to all of our employees and said hey would you be fine with

interacting with 30 minutes with this interviewer uh in order to tell about how it is to work a CL and benefits and strengths and so forth and then it took that information summarized it and basically came back with like you know what are the strengths and weaknesses of working clana could be improved Etc right now the point is we built that and today there are already AI tools and startups out there offering similar Sol solutions that you can use for customer surveys or for employe surveys or engagement surveys Etc so it's not like we were

the only ones doing that neither are we in the business of doing that um so obviously you could say today we should have bought it but with that said I am so happy we built that because we learned so much and the employes in t CL learned so much from building that that we're now applying those learnings to other things and we're not using that so then maybe today we'd go and buy that from somebody but still happy that we did it so I feel liit like this is such an emerging industry obviously if you

see something that you feel intuitively is just better than anything you can build yourselves right now I would do it but there's also like so much power in Just letting people learn how to use these things and deploy them and develop them because it's such a new technology and there's such a massive value created from people learning to do these things themselves so that's why we're a little bit cautious still about like buying too much from these even though we really want to be supportive of the start community and so forth we're a little bit

cautious cuz we just want to try ourselves first to learn um and so that's that's how we're thinking about it um and I think then I would also ask one add one more thing on it like when we for example initiated that discussion about should we keep work there or not I contacted uh the CEO at that point of time and also I said like hey convince us about it and but then I realized one thing that was funny which is and this is an advice to all companies that if if I go to CHP

and I say what does the API document what what is the API call that I can do with workday workday at I'm sure they fixed it now but at that point I gave them that feedback at that point of time their API documentation was behind the login so as a consequence of that CHP had not been trained on the apis of workday it is familiar with the apis of slack because those are public documentation and it's even more familiar with things that are open source because it's been trained on the open source Library so there's

suddenly this massive benefit from being open source software and even more so to make sure that you have public apis and public documentation of your software because then suddenly you know CHP understands that he can interact it and support you in your interaction with that this just like a funny reflection so I really encourage like these you know more traditional companies to like make sure that everything you have is actually you know publicly available easy and you know don't lock this behind doors right because then it's not going to be used to the same degree

yeah yeah yeah um speaking of locked line doors a lot of the stuff we've talked about so far is kind of the internal to Clara operations benefits of AI let's talk about the um product what what have you seen or what what do you see coming for AI in your product ah now I'm going to be even more kidy um I I look I I am extremely excited we have some we have some stuff that's going to go live in a few weeks that is like it's like a beta but it would basically be the

customer service assistant on steroids in a sense that it will be even better but it would also start advising you and giving you some ideas and thoughts around you know the type of services that clana offers that I think people will find quite cool um but it's still beta right it's not it's not going to be something yet of that kind I when I then look at our internal projects I think within 6 to 12 months we will be able to start launching things that are truly uh disruptive in the way of services but the

funny thing with this and is that back in 2015 long before all of this happened uh at that point time CL was trying to compete with would stripe an Adan on being a payment service provider and when addan signed Spotify which is a neighbor of ours we were just had to look ourselves in in the in the mirror and say you know they're beating the crap out of us both stri and addan so we had to change direction and at that point of time we kind of pivoted and when we sat down in 15 and

asked ourselves where is financial services going already then we said well eventually in the future you wake up in the morning and your digit told Financial assistant says hey Pat I've analyzed your Mortage and I realize I'll save you 10 bucks by switching from Bank a to bank B and by the way the only thing you need to do is say yes right and so like we realized that that's going to happen that was a revelation to us in 15 now we just like self-driving cars we couldn't predict how fast or when that's going to

happen but it was very clear to us that like eventually that's going to happen and for an industry like Banks banking what does that mean first and foremost what's cool about it it means the evaporation of all the excess profits in banking industry because a lot of the bank profits are built on the lack of customer Mobility the in in willingness of us as customers to move between Banks and the friction associated with it and when AI assistance will allow you to do that just because you say yes then that will Dynamic that would that

will make a big difference in the market dynamics and the competitiveness of fintech and Banks and I see that happening in the coming 2 three years for sure and so ever since then that's been the direction of the company and that's still the direction we want to because we realize to ourselves like we don't want to be one of those Banks we want to be that digital financial advisor of yours that's what we want to be we want to be that AI digital finan assistant that helps you save time save money make you feel more

in control of your finances and I think that's the Natural Evolution of every fintech um and that's where we want to go so so that is the direction and that's the type of services uh that we're building and trying to accomplish and you know I've this Vision we've had with the current management team that I work with has all been with me almost about 10 years this has been the vision for 10 years but obviously when we saw CHP we felt like uhoh it's going to happen sooner than later it's going to go a little

bit faster than we thought um and the services we're building are all in that direction it's just about helping people save time save money being more in control of their finances but about on the shopping side like I'm I'm I'm addicted to your app as a you know Avid Shopper too Avid Shopper uh and I I guess my dream is to have like an AI stylist that would be that' be incredible um do you guys think you'll you'll make plays there as well I think I think there will be I mean it's interesting um it's

interesting I think in general if you look at e or Commerce you could basically you can basically think about it as three things there's a curation job to be done which is what you're talking on there is the brand the product in the brand and then there's the infrastructure that helps you B you know payments shipping all the stuff that's needed between I think that's why if if I think about the AI evolution in Commerce I'm less worried about the brands like Nike will be Nike and people will want to buy Nike right um retailers

is a bit more different because the curation has already been split up we have Tik Tok we have Instagram we have influencers uh and we have the retailer the Best Buy agent who's trying to help you recommend which TV you're supposed to buy right and so I think that within curation recommendation of products and selection I am 100% convinced that you're right Sonia you're going to see a rise in such right um but it's also very difficult case to do like I've seen a lot of the attempts for example to do travel AI suggestions I

tried it myself since I'm planning a road trip in the US with the family this summer and like and it was pretty bad you know so it's just hard because like you need to understand who I am and what my preferences are and what do I think and it's just it's more complex than we think right so I I I think it will happen um but I think it will take a little bit longer time maybe like there's a lot of things still that needs to come into place but it I think it's a little

bit different if you're thinking like you know there's obviously easier things it's easier things are like I mean Amazon is already doing some of the stuff already but like easier things would be like hey aad I know you're using contact lenses and I saw you bought them a month ago you're probably running out of them do you want the few do you want the new one that's easier right then like hey Sonia you know I think this dress would fit you because like your your style is according to this so I'm because but I show

you I can tell you one cool thing on this topic which I think at least blew my mind away and that was internally we had done a test this is just a test right the idea was that within the clown app when you open it there's category pictures okay so there's like a category picture like shoes you know this home Garden Products whatever so what they had done is they had taken and taken me my customer profile all of my transactions that I've done with clana everything they taken my profile as a user Sebastian and

then based on that they had generated a category image which was a shoe what looks like a bit like a Nike shoe and they just wanted to create a more personalized category image that would catch my attention so it was a imaginary AI created image of a shoe but the crazy thing is I looked at it and I was like I want to buy that one like it's like and I am not a big shopper I'm not a big shopper right but I was just like that is insane there's something in the fact that you

fed my profile into that my preferences of Brands and purchases and all that and the image you generated was actually attractive and you know we already know that she and and the others are doing amazing stuff where they are predicting purchase behaviors and testing products on small quantities and they you know and people start buying them and then they produce more quantities and they're super fast it's super impressive to see what these guys are doing and sometimes I feel also people forget that like actually that leads to less waste because the bigger retailers buy a

lot of products that never get sold and it's bad for the environment so this is actually better for the environment to some degree even though people are very critical about it but what I thought here is just like wow I just felt like I got a glimpse into the future I was like the next thing is I'm going to be out shopping and the images that I will see are things that doesn't even exist they're just you know created on the Fly based on my profile and then if I do click them and want to

buy them they're going to be produced post me saying I want this right and that was just like that's and again these are like the self-driving cars things I don't know when but it felt I felt very convinced that it will happen eventually right I think that was pretty cool I was just like wow that's the next level um you know products generated there because there was it was funny cuz it was a shoe and the other thing it had created was an image of a apparently I bought a lot of Home gardening stuff which

sounds odd cuz I'm not the big home Goden person but and it had created a lawn mower you know like one of those that you cut a lawn with but it was super nicely designed and I was like yeah that's how I would like a lawn mow to look like I going be a really nice design can I get that one you know so so I think that that's a glimpse into the future the future will be generated let's uh let's move into a sort of Rapid Fire round and we'll start with a question we'd

like to ask people who do you admire most in the world of AI n but it has to be Sam I'm sorry it's like a it's easy question great next question Sonia uh Sebastian you and your wife are both patrons of the Arts and and Avid art collectors uh do you have any AI art in your collection and do you think you will ever have any AI art in your collection uh I don't have I think I could have I think to me an image is something that's supposed to create an emotional reaction of some

sorts right and I think it's fascina I don't mind if the emotional reaction is created by an AI if it touches me and it means something to me that's what's important but that doesn't mean that I don't think we will continue to buy a lot of art from Human Maids as well right what is your best piece of advice for Founders who are building with AI today I don't know I think it depends I think the founders are doing well I think the smaller companies are doing well I think it's the big companies that should

stop discarding this as Bitcoin or some kind of you know temporary Trend now we're not going to get into the Bitcoin because I know some other people on this call have different opinions tonight but but um uh but uh yeah I think that's the important like don't like be cautious lean into it try it test it yourself like you know explore it learn it like don't fear it just try to learn um I think that's the best thing you know and you can always start talking about yeah what about Ai and the world will end

and this and that yeah I'm like I get it I can also sit down at dinner sometimes and talk about these things because they're fascinating but in the end like a meteor might hit us in hit me in the head tomorrow as well like I mean things can happen you can't predict these things so the only thing you can do is try to lean in and learn and explore that's my opinion like at please try to understand it better awesome Sebastian thank you for doing this thank you for having me [Music] [Music] [Music]