Sales & customer service (2025)

A rare mea culpa in tech land: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, cofounder and CEO of fintech giant Klarna, last week said the company’s pursuit of customer service cost-cutting, fueled by advancements in AI, had gone too far. In an interview with Bloomberg, Siemiatkowski said the company is going on a recruitment drive so the buy-now-pay-later company’s customers will always have the option of speaking to a real person. The fintech stopped hiring for over a year as it focused on building AI capabilities.

It’s a notable moment for a sector that’s replacing humans with AI technology at a pell-mell pace. Berlin startup Parloa, which raised a $120m Series C last week and became a unicorn in the process, is one of several companies — one competitor is London’s PolyAI — capable of producing uncanny lifelike voices that can talk to customers over the phone. In what sounds like bad news for customer service folk, Parloa says its AI agents mimic natural human conversation flows and have the ability to learn and improve with every interaction they have. Customers include insurance giant Swiss Life and sports retailer Decathlon.

“The telephone is 148 years old. Voice AI is giving it a brain,” Michael Stothard, an investor at VC firm Firstminute Capital, wrote on Linkedin last week. He listed the big recent breakthroughs in AI technology: speech-to-text is near-perfect, AI voices can remember, emote, interrupt, and sound human, costs have dropped 60–90%, he estimated. “Nearly every software founder we meet is thinking about voice,” Stothard wrote.

Will we have AI salespeople? We’re not there yet, though AI is helping to automate sales admin, train newcomers, bring more accuracy to forecasts and provide leaders with insights. Last year, for example, Munich startup Voiceline raised a €2.4m seed round for a platform that automatically transcribes and analyses sales conversations. This information is then used to generate automated follow-up actions, significantly reducing the time spent on post-visit paperwork. Belgian AI-based sales assistant Donna also recently raised an early stage round. The technology will call the salesperson after they’ve had a meeting with a prospect, collect the necessary information and then automatically update the company CRM and draft a follow-up email to the prospect.

These are just two in a smattering of sales tech deals, though none as big as the investments seen on the customer service side. The good news if you’re a human: the task of replacing salespeople with AI is not going to be nearly as straightforward.