Klarna bet big on AI to replace its customer service team. Now it’s learning that chatbots, however impressive, still can’t replicate the patience of an actual human being explaining why a payment didn’t go through.
The buy-now-pay-later giant launched an AI chatbot in partnership with OpenAI in early 2024, automating work equivalent to roughly 800 full-time customer service agents and handling approximately 1.3 million customer inquiries per month. The result was a 40% reduction in customer service costs per transaction.
The AI experiment hits a wall
Klarna’s workforce shrank dramatically, falling by somewhere between 39% and 60% since 2022/2023. The company went from roughly 5,500 employees to a target of around 3,400 by late 2024 or early 2025. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has floated the idea of eventually dropping below 2,000 employees by 2030, with 96% of remaining staff using AI tools daily.
But by May 2025, Siemiatkowski acknowledged what customers had been saying for months. The AI-only approach was degrading service quality.
