Klarna's AI Revolution: How Hiring Customers and Boosting Pay Transformed Customer Service

Few CEOs have spoken as openly about internal AI use as Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the CEO of Sweden-based buy-now, pay-later provider Klarna. His appearance at Charter’s Leading with AI Summit Feb. 10—where he discussed lessons he’s learned from the fintech company’s ambitious AI rollout—was no exception.

“I had to pay a lot for saying that,” Siemiatkowski told Charter editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney at the summit, referring to a past statement where he said AI could do “all our jobs,” including his own. “People were very angry with me for saying that.” Since 2022, Klarna has been on the bleeding edge of AI adoption, rolling out an AI agent for customer support it says handles the equivalent work of 850 human agents. The company has seen a roughly 50% workforce reduction through attrition since 2022, Siemiatkowski said.

But along the way, Siemiatkowski has also realized that while the AI assistant works for simple service requests, being able to talk to a human still matters, and remains a premium service that customers value. “We actually are rethinking this. We’re going to use AI to support humans and also support the simplest [tasks], but we think it’s going to be like the future to offer human support—it’s going to be like the VIP treatment,” he says.

Below, a few takeaways from our conversation with Siemiatkowski:

For top-tier service, consider hiring your biggest fans.

For a higher-tier VIP service, Siemiatkowski said, “the most exciting project we have currently is we’re hiring our own customers. We’re actually onboarding our own customers, the most passionate customers.” The Uber-like approach, in which customers contract to offer Klarna service for a few hours at a time, lets people work remotely. “They love Klarna, right? They know how it works. Their customer service is just so different.”

Higher compensation can be an incentive as attrition rises.

Siemiatkowski said that while headcount fell through attrition, revenue has also “grown and exploded since then,” rising from $300,000 to $1.3 million per employee since 2022. Alongside that, Klarna has raised average employee compensation too. “My employees know that they’re driving efficiencies, but they are also participating in getting the benefit of that,” he said. “It’s not just like more work, it’s also more compensation.”

People whose jobs focus on relationship-building are more secure.

Siemiatkowski said a “big part of our employees are today teams that work with our partners,” such as retailers like Macy’s, Sephora, or Nike. The people in local offices who manage those relationships? “AI is not going to touch their jobs.”

Business acumen is becoming more valuable than coding.

During the first two years of Klarna’s AI strategy, Siemiatkowski said Klarna focused on hiring engineers. But that has “switched, actually. It’s almost the opposite:” The business knowledge of non-coders—who can use AI to code but also know what kind of dashboards or features are needed—is increasingly valuable, he said. “The engineers, they’re like, ‘okay, I coded this feature. What do I do next?’”

Leading by example, with senior executives using AI tools, is essential.

Siemiatkowski notes he joked with OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman that if you trained AI to be like a CEO, and got rid of CEOs, “everyone would cheer that.” Becoming more serious, he said it’s “even more important is [to] lead by example right now. Show people what’s possible. Show them how to use these tools, empower them.”

He gave the example of a recent presentation his employees were giving about pricing strategy. Siemiatkowski dropped their Google Sheet into the AI tool Cursor during the meeting, added a prompt, and made a visualization and dashboard. “Forty minutes later, when they were still talking and doing the presentation, I was like, ‘guys, stop and let me show you this,’” he said. “The one thing I would encourage everyone to do is to download Cursor,” he said. “Just download it, pay the license, … create a project and then just push in an idea there. Build me something. If you haven’t done that, you will not fully appreciate the change that we’re going to go through.”