This Week in AI: CPOs Say AI Still Needs a Human Touch

This week in artificial intelligence, chief product officers said AI needs human oversight, even for routine, automated tasks like fraud detection. Meanwhile, AI was partly responsible for a 40% reduction in staff at Klarna, Perplexity added PayPal in checkout, and more.

Chief Product Officers Say AI Needs a Human Touch

Generative artificial intelligence is being adopted among companies in all industries, driving innovation and strategic functions.

However, while optimism about the technology’s effectiveness is high, human oversight is still the norm, even for routine, automated tasks like fraud detection.

Goods and technology firms use generative AI differently than services companies, highlighting its impact on product design, workforces and the future of automation.

Klarna CEO: AI Partly Responsible for 40% Workforce Drop

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski attributed part of a 40% staff reduction to the company’s AI investments.

The Swedish pay later FinTech also saw natural attrition, he said Wednesday (May 14).

“The truth is, the company has shrunk from about 5,000 to now almost 3,000 employees,” Siemiatkowski said. “If you go to LinkedIn and look at the jobs, you’ll see how we’re shrinking.”

In 2024, Klarna used an AI-generated version of Siemiatkowski during an earnings call to illustrate the technology’s potential to automate jobs.

PayPal and Perplexity Partner on Checkout

AI search provider Perplexity launched a partnership with PayPal Wednesday.

Perplexity said it will use PayPal to power agentic commerce on its Perplexity Pro platform. Starting this summer, consumers in the United States can check out instantly using PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity to look for products, book travel or buy tickets.

“Perplexity wants to have accurate, trustworthy answers wherever people are making decisions,” Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas said. “PayPal is a natural partner because we share a vision for how important trust is in the age of AI.”

Allpay Uses AI to Increase Back-Office Efficiency

Allpay, a payments processor in the United Kingdom, is using AI and cloud intelligence to position itself for future growth.

The FinTech provider saw a 10% boost in coding productivity and a 25% increase in production releases in nine months — surpassing its total output from the previous year — after adopting an AI coding assistant and migrating its systems to the cloud through Microsoft Azure.

These changes are part of its wider digital transformation strategy after the company realized its legacy data center infrastructure could not support its growth plans.

OpenAI Website Traffic Surges

OpenAI’s AI tools showed a surge in website traffic in the past two months.

From late March to early May, traffic rose 27% from around 150 million visits to 190 million for OpenAI. By May 9, OpenAI’s platforms accounted for an estimated 190 million of the 240 million daily average visits to all AI platforms. That’s nearly 80% of all generative AI tool traffic.

Google was second, with traffic remaining relatively unchanged at about 25 million daily average visits during the period. DeepSeek was third with about 20 million daily average visits.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.