In 2024, the buy-now-pay-later company Klarna announced that it would cut hundreds of customer service roles and begin using an artificial intelligence chatbot instead. The move was expected to save the company millions. But a year later, after customers complained about the degraded quality of customer service, Klarna began to quietly recruit human customer service agents back.
At first glance, the reversal appeared to be a victory for human workers in the age of AI. The reality was more complex. Instead of bringing on full-time customer service agents, who Klarna contracts through an outside agency, it instead brought on workers in what Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has described as “an Uber type of set-up”. Now, an AI chatbot continues to handle most of customers’ basic queries, while a growing number of gig workers handle the more advanced ones. “Just like somebody can go and drive an Uber for a while, they can actually jump on and work for Klarna’s customer service,” Siemiatkowski said on a podcast in February.
Consider this a glimpse into one of the ways artificial intelligence is poised to transform work. While labor economists remain divided on how much AI will replace jobs, they are more or less aligned on the idea that AI will replace some parts of most jobs. The optimistic interpretation of this is that AI will take on more of the menial tasks from human workers, freeing them up to do higher-level work. The cynical interpretation? As companies increasingly integrate AI, they will use it to hire fewer full-time employees, shifting toward a fragmented workforce that resembles the gig economy.
“Gig work” refers to flexible, short-term or on-demand work. The term originally comes from the music industry, like a band playing a “gig”. It’s now commonly used to describe workers on platforms like Uber, DoorDash or Taskrabbit. These jobs give workers some autonomy to choose when and how much to work, but they also lack most of the benefits afforded to full-time workers: paid time off, health insurance, workers’ compensation, overtime or even a minimum wage.
“One of the things we talk about as sociologists who study work is this idea about work moving from the career to the job to the gig. And AI makes it even easier to do that,” says Alexandrea Ravenelle, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy. For the last decade, gig work was primarily seen as the domain of rideshare drivers and couriers. But now, many industries are discovering that if they can outsource some parts of a job to technology, they can cut down on the cost of workers by hiring more workers as contractors rather than full-time, benefited employees.
This transformation is hitting white-collar desk workers hardest as…
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