Author(s): Suchit Majumdar
Originally published on Towards AI.
In May 2025, Sebastian Siemiatkowski — the same Klarna CEO who fifteen months earlier had told the world that one OpenAI-powered assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents — quietly started hiring humans back. Bloomberg got the quote: “Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor, what you end up having is lower quality.” Headcount over the same window went from 5,527 at the end of 2022 to 3,422 at the end of 2024, per the S-1 Klarna filed in November. The chatbot stayed. The “all-AI customer service” story did not.
So the title of this piece is half a lie, and I want to correct it before you read another paragraph. Chatbots are not, in any general sense, being replaced by autonomous agents in 2026. The replacement is happening in one specific place: queue-shaped back-office work where no human is waiting on the other end, and almost nowhere else. That narrow claim is the thesis. The broad version is what every vendor deck says, and it is wrong. If you walked out of your last AI strategy review thinking the agent wave is about to subsume your support org, your sales org, and your engineering org all at once, you are about to spend the next four quarters defending a budget against numbers that will not arrive.
