Fintech and e-commerce platform Klarna is shopping around a handful of new features for its AI shopping assistant. Klarna’s AI now works as a chatbot employing OpenAI’s AI models to make shopping faster and adapt the experience to your preferences. The idea is to turn looking for a product or sale into a conversation and to adjust recommendations from Klarna to better match what you like.
Klana envisions its AI chatbot as a kind of personal shopper you can talk to like a human being. If you have specific requests based on particular details of a product or how well it is rated, the assistant can get together a list that’s more narrowly tailored than searching by keywords. The AI will also curate reviews, chart price changes, and otherwise take the initiative in its responses. You can then make the purchase through Klarna’s app.
Even without you making a specific query, the AI will make recommendations for things you might like based on previous history and stated preferences. Klarna described how the AI could offer ideas based on things you buy at a certain time every year or the colors and brands you usually choose for products like clothes and accessories.
If you’re someone who does a lot of research before a purchase, Klarna’s AI tool will speed that up by putting together product comparisons that match your request for price or other aspects. The AI will even lay out and compare the positive and negative reasons for buying each option. And if you’re more of the “I don’t know what to get for an upcoming trip or event,” you can ask the AI, and it will put together a shopping list before diving into specific suggestions for what to buy to match your budget and needs.
“For decades, the tech industry assumed that the online shopping experience was tied up by a small number of massive tech players, which led to under-investment. That’s created an opportunity for companies like Klarna and we are enlisting AI to challenge the incumbents,” said David Fock, Chief Product & Design Officer at Klarna. “We’ve combined the intelligence of LLMs, the knowledge of Pricerunner, and the Klarna UX to build a smoother and more intuitive, chat-based shopping experience.”
Klarna is early to the game, but it’s not the only online shopping source embedding AI in its platform. Amazon rolled out the Rufus chatbot earlier this year, which performs much the same role as Klarna’s chatbot. Rufus uses Amazon’s AI models to recommend purchases and provide details on products conversationally. Because it’s Amazon, that may include advertisements too. Just this week, the company showcased a new AI recommendation system personalized in greater detail than before, with titles for products adjusted to highlight whatever aspect of a product you’re hunting for at the moment.
To build its AI assistant, Klarna trained the OpenAI model to know the more than 5.6 million products available. That way, the chatbot is less likely to fall prey to hallucinations and can share accurate costs, availability, and delivery options, even if there are cashback options. It builds on the company’s partnership with OpenAI to run customer service, which rapidly scaled up to handle the majority of incoming requests, doing the equivalent of 700 customer service agents and conducting more than 2 million conversations in mere weeks.
“Klarna is at the forefront of seizing the potential of AI to deliver tangible benefits to customers,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said. “We’re excited to continue collaborating and showing the power of AI at scale,”
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