173 | 💨 🔥 Erasing $22.5 billion in wages

In today’s Brainyacts:

1. Thousands unemployed and lost wages

2. Microsoft Copilot’s Notebook feature

3. Tons of AI news today

4. AI environmental costs are soaring and other AI-related content

👋 to new subscribers!

To read previous editions, click here.

Lead Memo

👩‍💻 🔥 Erasing $22.5 billion in wages

This may be small or easy to dismiss but it is the tip of the iceberg.

Financial services company partners with OpenAI and the results are staggering!

But first, Klarna, is a Swedish fintech company that provides online financial services. The company provides payment processing services for the e-commerce industry, managing store claims and customer payments. The company is a "buy now, pay later" service provider. The company has more than 5,000 employees, most of them working at the headquarters in Stockholm and Berlin.

Together with OpenAI, Klarna developed an AI assistant that lives in their app. This assistant is designed to enhance the shopping and payments experience for Klarna’s 150 million consumers worldwide. It is capable of managing a range of tasks from multilingual customer service to managing refunds and returns, and fostering healthy financial habits.

The App has been live globally for just 1 month now, and this is the impact:

• The AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats

• It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents

• It is on par with human agents in regard to customer satisfaction score

• It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries

• Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously

• It’s available in 23 markets, 24/7, and communicates in more than 35 languages

• It’s estimated to drive a $40 million USD in profit improvement to Klarna in 2024

I suggest you reread those bullet points above. Then contemplate this: If 1 month of this newly developed AI agent can replace 700 full-time agents, what impact will AI have on these realities of the economy:

• There are over 2,982,900 customer service representatives currently employed just in the United States.

• 69.5% of all customer service representatives are women, while 30.5% are men.

• The average customer service representative age is 40 years old.

• The average annual pay is $37,780

If AI was to replace just 20% (a conservative estimate) of these roles within 5 years, that would be displacing roughly 596,580 jobs and erasing $22.5 billion in wages and taxable income.

Again, just in the US. Those are truly large gaps to fill.

Spotlight

✈️ 👩‍✈️ Have you tried Microsoft Copilot’s Notebook feature?

You likely have access to this by now as they have been rolling it out for a few weeks. It allows you to test and refine your prompt in real-time versus re-prompting like you have to do in other conversational AI models.

This is not an Earth-shattering feature but I know many of you struggle to write effective prompts. This is an easy way to strengthen your prompting skills.

Click the Twitter/X image below to open up a short tutorial.

AI Model Notables

► French AI startup Mistral just released its highly anticipated Mistral Large model while also announcing a new chatbot and major partnership with Microsoft. 

• Mistral Large boasts top-tier reasoning abilities and multilingual fluency, claiming to rank second only to GPT-4 on key benchmarks.

• The new model has a 32k context window, and its API usage pricing comes in cheaper than GPT-4T at $8 / million tokens.

• The company also launched a beta version of its ChatGPT competitor ‘Le Chat’.

• Microsoft announced a new partnership with Mistral, bringing the startups' models to Azure users while providing infrastructure and scaling resources.

• And there are EU antitrust concerns.

► Google aims to relaunch Gemini AI image tool in a few weeks.

► [Text-to-video games] Google introduces Genie, a foundation world model trained from Internet videos that can generate an endless variety of playable (action-controllable) worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches.

► Deustche Telekom revealed its app-less, AI-powered ‘T-Phone’ at the Mobile World Congress 2024, also announcing a partnership with Perplexity AI for real-time info.

► ChatGPT app coming to Android phones [game changer as I use the mobile app more than the website].

► Apple ponders whether to develop AI smart glasses, fitness ring.

► Thomson Reuters debuts generative AI assistant for Australia's legal profession.

► Figure 01 – autonomous AI robot latest update:

► Related: Nvidia, Intel, and Jeff Bezos invest millions in AI humanoid robot company.

► Stable Diffusion 3 arrives to solidify early lead in AI imagery against Sora and Gemini.

News You Can Use:

➭ Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret

➭ The European AI Office will be the center of AI expertise across the EU. It will play a key role in implementing the AI Act

➭ Meta ramps up efforts to combat disinformation ahead of crucial EU elections

➭ These major companies are using AI to snoop through employees’ messages, report reveals

➭ AI can predict Alzheimer’s disease up to seven years before symptoms appear

➭ Democratic operative admits to commissioning fake Biden robocall that used AI

➭ US used AI to find targets for strikes on Syria and Yemen

Who is the author, Josh Kubicki?

Some of you know me. Others do not. Here is a short intro. I am a lawyer, entrepreneur, and teacher. I have transformed legal practices and built multi-million dollar businesses. Not a theorist, I am an applied researcher and former Chief Strategy Officer, recognized by Fast Company and Bloomberg Law for my unique work. Through this newsletter, I offer you pragmatic insights into leveraging AI to inform and improve your daily life in legal services.