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.”
Klarna isn’t alone. Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that’s more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.
In January of last year, a survey of over 1,400 business executives found that 66 percent were “ambivalent or outright dissatisfied with their organization’s progress on AI and GenAI so far.” The top issue corporate bosses cited was AI’s “lack of talent and skills.”
It’s a problem that evidently hasn’t improved over the year. Another survey recently found that over 55 percent of UK business leaders who rushed to replace jobs with AI now regret their decision.
It’s not hard to see why. An experiment carried out by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University stuffed a fake software company full of AI employees, and their performance was laughably bad — the best AI worker finished just 24 percent of the tasks assigned to it.
When it comes to the question of whether AI will take jobs, there seem to be as many answers as there are CEOs excited to save a buck.
There are gray areas, to be sure — AI is certainly helping corporations speed up low-wage outsourcing, and the tech is having a verifiable effect on labor market volatility — just don’t count on CEOs to have much patience as AI starts to chomp at their bottom line.
More on AI: Dystopia Intensifies as Startup Lets You Take Out a Micro-Loan to Get Fast Food