Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back
"What you end up having is lower quality."

Two years after partnering with OpenAI to automate marketing and customer service jobs, financial tech startup Klarna says it's longing for human connection again.

Once gunning to be OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's "favorite guinea pig," Klarna is now plotting a big recruitment drive after its AI customer service agents couldn't quite hack it.
The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents. Now, the company says it imagines an "Uber-type of setup" to fill their ranks, with gig workers logging in remotely to argue with customers from the comfort of their own homes.
"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," admitted Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the Swedish fintech's CEO.
That's a pretty big shift from his comments in December of 2024, when he told Bloomberg he was "of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do." A year before that, Klarna had stopped hiring humans altogether, reducing its workforce by 22 percent.

A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of "700 full-time agents." So why the sudden about-face? As it turns out, leaving your already-frustrated customers to deal with a slop-spinning algorithm isn't exactly best practice.
As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, "cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality."