'Lower quality': Swedish company CEO says AI failed, plans to bring back human workers

Klarna is not alone in reassessing the role of AI in operations.

Swedish fintech company Klarna has announced plans to launch a major recruitment drive following the underperformance of its artificial intelligence (AI) customer service agents. The company, known for its "buy now, pay later" services, had previously embraced AI in a significant way, reducing human headcount to cut costs and increase efficiency. However, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has now acknowledged that the move did not deliver the desired quality of service.

According to a report in Futurism, Siemiatkowski admitted that AI had fallen short in customer-facing roles, prompting a reconsideration of the company's staffing strategy. “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,” he said.

“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 halted recruitment entirely in 2023 as it doubled down on its partnership with OpenAI. At the time, the company heavily promoted its AI transition. Siemiatkowski boasted about the financial savings enabled by automation, claiming the company had saved $10 million on marketing costs by assigning generative AI systems tasks such as translation, data analysis and art production.

By December 2024, he made headlines by declaring, “AI can already do all the jobs that we, as humans, do.” Klarna stated that its AI agents were performing the work of 700 customer service employees.

However, the company’s workforce figures told a different story. Klarna’s full-time employee count dropped from 5,527 at the end of December 2022 to 3,422 by December 2023, as revealed in its IPO prospectus filed in March 2025.

Klarna is not alone in reassessing the role of AI in operations. Earlier this month, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike—responsible for a global IT outage—announced it would be cutting five per cent of its workforce, replacing many roles with AI.

Language-learning platform Duolingo has also moved in a similar direction. The company said it would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.” It further noted that it would be using AI to assess performance reviews. Future headcount increases would only be approved if a team demonstrated that further automation was not possible.

Duolingo defended its strategy by drawing parallels with its 2012 pivot to mobile. However, like Klarna, the company’s shift has raised questions about the long-term viability of reducing human involvement in favour of automation.