AI-first company

Company case

Klarna: an AI assistant took two-thirds of support chats, then the company hired people again

Klarna reported large savings from an AI support assistant. About a year later its chief executive said the company had judged the work too much on cost, and it began hiring human agents again. The AI assistant stayed.

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Outcome Partly walked back

The company reported a result, then changed course.

In the guide What fails

At a glance

Company
KlarnaPayments and shopping service
Size
Enterprise (1,000+ employees)
Industry
E-commerce and retail Klarna’s customers are online shoppers, and support chat is a task online retailers automate too.
Where and when
Sweden, with customers in 23 markets. 2024–2025.
Who produced the figures
The company itselfEvery figure on this page comes from Klarna’s own press releases and earnings calls.

What they did

In early 2024 Klarna put an AI assistant, built with OpenAI, into its customer-service chat. It handled customer-service questions, including refunds and returns, in 23 markets and more than 35 languages. Customers could still ask for a human agent.

The numbers

After the first month, Klarna reported:

  • 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of all its customer-service chats.
  • Work equal to that of 700 full-time agents.
  • Customer satisfaction on a par with human agents.
  • 25% fewer repeat enquiries.
  • Issues resolved in under 2 minutes, down from 11.
  • An expected $40 million improvement in profit for 2024.

The $40 million was a forecast, not a result.

What happened next

  • May 2025: a change of course. Klarna’s chief executive told Bloomberg that cost had been “a too predominant evaluation factor” in how the company organised customer service. He said customers must always be able to reach a person, and that investing in the quality of human support was the way forward. Klarna began a pilot to recruit human agents who work remotely, with flexible hours.
  • The assistant stayed. A Klarna spokesperson said at the time that the AI still handled two-thirds of enquiries. The company’s line was that AI deals with the simple questions and people handle the ones that matter most.
  • The savings claims continued. In its results for the first quarter of 2025, Klarna said customer-service cost per transaction had fallen 40% in two years, with satisfaction held level. On its third-quarter 2025 earnings call it said the assistant was doing the work of 853 full-time agents and had saved $60 million.
  • Fewer staff, more revenue per head. In its fourth-quarter 2025 results, Klarna reported revenue of $1.24 million per employee and a headcount 49% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2022. These are company figures, and they do not separate the effect of AI from other causes.

What the case shows

  • AI can take a large share of simple support questions. Klarna has repeated the two-thirds figure for more than a year.
  • Cost alone is the wrong test. The company that published the most quoted savings figure later said, in its own chief executive’s words, that it had weighed cost too heavily.
  • The end state was a mix. AI answers the routine questions. People take the hard ones, and customers can ask for a person.
  • Klarna is not the only reversal. Commonwealth Bank of Australia cut 45 customer-service roles for a voice bot, then said the roles were not redundant and apologised.

A field study of 5,172 support agents is the measured evidence for this kind of work. There, AI helped human agents instead of replacing them.

What this says about the practices

Practices the company applied

What the company changed afterwards

Sources

  1. Klarna (27 February 2024). Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month. Press release. klarna.com
  2. Klarna (19 May 2025). First-quarter 2025 results. Press release. klarna.com
  3. Customer Experience Dive (9 May 2025). Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service. Reports the chief executive’s interview with Bloomberg and a statement from Klarna. customerexperiencedive.com
  4. Customer Experience Dive (20 November 2025). Klarna says its AI agent is doing the work of 853 employees. Reports Klarna’s third-quarter 2025 earnings call. customerexperiencedive.com
  5. Klarna Group plc. Fourth-quarter 2025 results. Press release. s205.q4cdn.com
  6. Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond (2025). Generative AI at Work. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 140(2), 889–942. What this study did and found