Swedish Company That Fired Human Workers For AI Two Years Ago Now Wants Them Back

A Swedish fintech company is plotting a big recruitment drive to hire human workers after its artificial intelligence (AI) customer agents could not get the job done properly. Two years ago, Klarna, a company providing buy now, pay later loans, pivoted towards AI by partnering up with OpenAI and reducing headcount to increase efficiency.

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, however, has now admitted that the quality of work done by the AI agents was low and the company needed the human touch back, according to a report in Futurism.

"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," said Mr Siemiatkowski.

"Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organising this, what you end up having is lower quality," he added.

Klarna stopped hiring altogether in 2023 as it ramped up AI use among its ranks. At one point, Mr Siemiatkowski bragged that Klara had saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. Even in December 2024, he claimed that "AI can already do all the jobs that we, as humans do". The company said AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents.

Klarna's headcount fell from 5,527 full-time employees as of the end of December 2022 to 3,422 staffers last December, according to the company's IPO prospectus filed in March.

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AI taking jobs

Klarna is not the only company to have hopped on the AI bandwagon to slash jobs. Earlier this month, CrowdStrike, the infamous cybersecurity company responsible for the massive global IT outage, announced that it was slashing five per cent of its workforce and replacing it with AI.

Similarly, language-learning platform Duolingo announced it would "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle".

The company justified its switch in approach, stating that it had taken a similar call in 2012 by betting big on mobile. Apart from not using contractors anymore, Duolingo will use AI to evaluate performance reviews. Additionally, headcounts will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.