After years of depicting Klarna as an AI-first company, the fintech’s CEO reversed himself, telling Bloomberg the company was once again recruiting humans after the AI approach led to “lower quality.” An IBM survey reveals this is a common occurrence for AI use in business, where just 1 in 4 projects delivers the return it promised and even fewer are scaled up.
After months of boasting that AI has let it drop its employee count by over a thousand, Swedish fintech Klarna now says it’s gone too far and is hiring people again.
Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg the company is in the midst of a recruitment drive to ensure customers always have a human to talk to.
“[I]t’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want,” he said.
The apparent turnaround comes after years in which Klarna touted its all-in-on-AI strategy. A year ago, Klarna said that its chatbot, powered by OpenAI, does the work of 700 human agents and does it much faster. In December, the company revealed that it had hired no human workers for the previous year, with the CEO boasting that “people internally at Klarna are just rallying to deploy as much efficiency AI as they can.”
“I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do,” the CEO told Bloomberg in February.
It now seems that, while chatbots are cheaper, they’re just not as good as humans for some jobs, according to Siemiatkowski.
“As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” he told Bloomberg this week. “Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”
A Klarna spokesperson told Fortune the company was maintaining its policy of not replacing employees who leave, outside of hiring freelance customer-service agents for the company’s outsourcing division, noting, “we’re very much still AI-first.”
But when it comes to tempering AI expectations, Klarna is far from alone. Just one in four AI projects delivers on the return on investment it promised, according to a recent IBM survey of 2,000 CEOs.
An even smaller portion, 16%, are scaled across the enterprise, the survey said.
Despite this dismal success rate, companies are going all-in on AI, driven largely by the belief that everyone else is doing it. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs (64%) say “the risk of falling behind drives them to invest in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization,” according to the study.
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