Recently someone sent me this article from futurism where the fintech company Klarna is reversing course on their drive to replace a large portion of their marketing workforce with AI over the last two years.

While this move saved costs, it led to a noticeable drop in service quality. As a result, they’re planning to bring humans back into customer support roles. I think this wont be the last we see article like this, as the AI hype starts to settle and the limitations become more apparent.

Memes aside, I’ve always suspected this drive some vocal CEOs are embarking on to replace people with AI will be a short-term gain with long-term pain. Klarna is reconstructing their customer-facing roles, but I fear their consequences would be much more substantial if they had bought into replacing technical roles (such as software engineering) with AI.

LLMs and AI agents are incredible tools with so much capability, I don’t think this should be downplayed at all. But that being said, they are also great at producing the most subtle bugs and issues that require a lot of skill to fix – sort of like a photocopy of a photocopy.

These models seem magical, but they’re ultimately only replicating patterns they’ve been exposed to in their training data. A lot of the time, that’s is very useful, but when used irresponsibly (or for decision-making) it can be pretty difficult to fix the mess it creates.

These subtle issues compound because a lot of life is non-linear and chaotic like a double-pendulum. A subtle difference can have compounding impacts and outcomes way down the line.

Personally, I reckon CEOs that jumped on this bandwagon reap what they sowed. I’m more saddened by the people who are caught in the cross-fire and lost their jobs as a result of this poor decision making.