Klarna's CEO says AI let it stop hiring. Its own jobs page and press office tell a more complicated story.

December 2024 — Klarna's chief executive says the Swedish payments company stopped hiring about a year ago because AI can do the work. Here's what changed after its AI assistant went live, what it cost, and what went wrong.

Cost and outcome (as of December 2024)

Chats handled by AI in month one: 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of customer service chats (Klarna figures). (Klarna)
Work equivalent: 700 full-time agents, Klarna says. (Klarna)
Projected gain: an estimated $40 million profit improvement in 2024, per Klarna. (Klarna)
Headcount: about 4,500 down to about 3,500, the CEO said. (TechCrunch)
Open roles: more than 50 listed on Klarna's jobs page when TechCrunch checked. (TechCrunch)
Cost of the AI system: Not disclosed.

Editor's note: Klarna's CEO said the company stopped hiring; its press office says it still backfills essential roles. We present both, so "stopped hiring" is marked Disputed ✕ below.

What Klarna launched

In February 2024, Klarna said its AI assistant, built with OpenAI, had handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month, two-thirds of all its customer service chats. An AI assistant here means a chatbot that answers customer questions and completes routine tasks, like refunds and returns, without a person.

Klarna said the assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time agents. It said customer satisfaction was on par with human agents, and repeat inquiries fell 25%. It said errands were resolved in under 2 minutes, compared with 11 minutes before. The assistant was live in 23 markets and spoke more than 35 languages. Klarna estimated a $40 million profit improvement in 2024.

The company also said customers could still choose to talk to a live agent. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer, was quoted in the release.

All of these are Klarna's own numbers. The release didn't say how satisfaction was measured or how the 700-agent figure was worked out.

The hiring claim

In December, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV: "We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we're 3,500." He said natural turnover did the rest: "People stay about 5 years — so 20% leave every year."

He went further: "I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do."

What the jobs page showed

TechCrunch found more than 50 open roles on Klarna's careers page. It also found that Klarna managers had posted about hiring at least half a dozen times in 2024.

Klarna's global press lead, John Craske, told TechCrunch the CEO's hiring comments were directionally true (TechCrunch's paraphrase), but that he was "simplifying for brevity in a broadcast interview." He said: "we were hiring between one to one and a half thousand people a year from 2019 to 2022." And: "Now, we're not actively recruiting to expand the workforce but only backfilling some essential roles, predominantly engineering."

So the more accurate version is a near-freeze. Klarna stopped growing headcount and let people leave without replacing most of them. It did not stop hiring altogether. TechCrunch noted Klarna's headcount was back to about where it was in 2021, and that the company was preparing for an IPO.

For operators, the useful part is the method. Klarna didn't announce layoffs tied to the bot. It froze growth and let attrition, meaning staff leaving on their own, shrink the workforce. That's a slower and quieter way to bank AI savings, and harder for outsiders to measure.

What went wrong

The headline claim didn't hold. "Stopped hiring" is Disputed ✕. Klarna's own press office said it still backfills essential roles.
The savings are self-reported. The 700-agent and $40 million figures come from Klarna, with no method published.
Customer service staff aren't broken out. We don't know how many of the 1,000 fewer employees were in support, or how many support agents Klarna outsources.
What we don't know yet: what the AI system costs to run, how satisfaction is measured, and whether the "AI can do all jobs" claim applies to customer service quality as well as volume.

Our follow-up question for Klarna

Of the roughly 1,000 fewer employees since 2023, how many worked in customer service, and how many outsourced agents does Klarna still pay for?

Sources

Klarna, “Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month,” Feb. 27, 2024. klarna.com
Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch, “Klarna's CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions,” Dec. 14, 2024. techcrunch.com

Disclosure: [not in copy] Editor placeholder