Today’s Story

“I expect our agencies to embrace AI to the same extent that we do, because that is almost a cultural alignment thing.” - Klarna CMO David Sandstrom per WSJ

The Klarna Marketing team has built out “AI copilots” for their marketing workloads “across the board.”

Treating marketing more as a product and looking to “10X…their impact and efficiency” with AI tools. In fact, the company cut sales and marketing spending by 11% in Q1 2024, attributing 37% of this reduction (equivalent to $10 million annually) to AI.

Generative AI tools like Midjourney and DALL-E alone saved $1.5 million on production in Q1, while reducing development time from six weeks to seven days.

Klarna’s recent announcement highlights the company's forward-thinking approach and sheds light on the industry-wide discussions regarding AI’s role in supercharging marketing departments.

This comes after Klarna reportledy built an AI-powered customer service agent, using OpenAI’s technology, that handled the equivalent workload of 700 full-time human agents.

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An AI image generated for Klarna used by the company’s marketing department.

Headlines

• Broadcom is in the AI 'sweet spot' (YF) - More AI Chips. Both their software and hardware offering are facing unprecedented AI demand.

• Brands Are Beginning to Turn Against AI (RS)- Certain brands are betting taking an anti AI stance will generate positive will with consumers.

• For AI National Security, Improve but Don’t Isolate Cyber (TH) - “Perhaps the most powerful undercurrent to Washington’s drive to adjust to AI are fears of China’s powerful AI sector.”

• “Apple Intelligence” Perhaps Challenges AI Only Devices (CB) - A future full of special AI first devices may be challenged by Apple’s broad integration of AI into IOS. It is also plausible to see a redesign of the iphone to be more AI centric in the future.

Research

AI Can Cheaply Scale Influence Operations

• At the end of May, OpenAI reported a significant development in its corporate history – the disclosure that bad actors had misused its products to run influence operations.

• This disclosure was evocative of a similar report from Meta, released a day earlier, which also detailed the takedown of six covert influence operations on its platform that utilized AI-generated content.

• As we move into an era of AI-driven influence operations, a collaborative approach of transparency, data sharing, and vigilance is essential to develop a more resilient digital ecosystem.

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