Klarna is backpedaling after cutting hundreds of human jobs and replacing them with artificial intelligence. The Swedish buy-now-pay-later company now says real people are essential to customer service and plans to bring them back—but in a gig-style setup.
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From All-In on AI to Human Reboot
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, once eager to make the company OpenAI’s “favorite guinea pig,” is now rethinking that approach. “From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want,” he told Bloomberg.
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The company previously laid off workers and paused hiring, touting its AI chatbot as capable of doing the work of 700 support agents. That strategy helped save $10 million on marketing and contributed to Klarna’s push for efficiency after its valuation plunged from $45.6 billion to $6.7 billion in 2022. But now, Klarna is shifting again.
The new plan is apparently to hire remote customer service agents who can log in and out as needed, similar to Uber drivers. The company is targeting students, rural populations, and even existing users to fill these roles. “There are tons of Klarna users that are very passionate about our company and would enjoy working for us,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg.
Reality Check for AI
This change comes after increasing signs that AI can't fully handle human-facing tasks. Siemiatkowski admitted to Bloomberg that Klarna went too far. “As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” he said.
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Investor Chamath Palihapitiya called Klarna's move a warning for the tech sector. He wrote on X that the company’s shift could force many startups to pivot to simply “use AI for narrow use cases” and warned that replacing humans with “probabilistic code” is “fraught with edge cases.”
Klarna’s approach now blends AI with human support, rather than relying entirely on automation. As spokesperson Clare Nordstrom told CX Dive: “AI gives us speed. Talent gives us empathy. Together, we can deliver service that’s fast when it should be, and empathetic and personal when it needs to be.”
Klarna says it’s committed to this hybrid model going forward, but the workforce will still shrink over time due to natural attrition. The company expects to drop from 3,000 employees to around 2,500 within a year as tech continues to evolve.
For Klarna, it's less about reversing course entirely and more about acknowledging that humans still matter, just on different terms.
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