The press release went out from New York on February 27, 2024, and it opened with a list of bullet points. Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, had switched on an AI assistant built with OpenAI. It had been live around the world for one month. “The numbers speak for themselves,” the release said.
In that month, the assistant had held 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats. It was doing “the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents.” Customers were sorting out their problems in under two minutes instead of 11. Repeat inquiries were down 25 percent. Customer satisfaction was on par with human agents. Klarna expected the assistant to add $40 million to its profit in 2024.
Chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski called it an “AI breakthrough in customer interaction.” Further down, the release added that customers could still choose to talk to live agents if they preferred.
The company was already shrinking. Klarna had stopped hiring in 2023, and its headcount fell from about 5,527 full-time employees at the end of 2022 to about 3,422 at the end of 2024. When it filed to go public in the United States on March 14, 2025, it said the drop came from a strategic decision to cut headcount and run more efficiently by using AI.
The filing updated the scorecard. The assistant was handling 62 percent of customer service chats, the work of more than 800 full-time agents, and had saved about $39 million in 2024. Klarna’s internal surveys, the filing said, showed “no drop in consumer satisfaction levels” since the launch.
Less than two months later, on May 8, Bloomberg published an interview with Siemiatkowski. According to Bloomberg, he was now saying that his pursuit of cost-cutting in customer service, fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, had gone too far. He was planning a rare recruitment drive, so that Klarna’s customers would always have the option of speaking to a real person.
CNBC, summarizing the same interview, reported that he acknowledged the full tilt toward AI in support had resulted in lower quality work. The new human agents, he said, would work “in an Uber type of setup.”
Bloomberg’s own framing was measured. It called the move a sign that the Swedish fintech’s commitment to AI has its limits.
Six days after the Bloomberg piece, Siemiatkowski was on CNBC describing the other side of the ledger. The company, he said, had shrunk from about 5,000 employees to almost 3,000, in part because of AI, and in part because it had stopped hiring and let people leave. “If you go to LinkedIn and look at the jobs,” he said, “you’ll see how we’re shrinking.”