Klarna Focuses on Human-Powered Customer Service

Pay-later firm Klarna is reportedly rethinking some of its AI-centered cost-cutting.

Now, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg News in an interview posted Thursday (May 8), the Swedish startup is undertaking a hiring effort to make sure customers always have the option of talking to a human customer service rep.

Siemiatkowski said the firm is testing a group of employees “in an Uber-type of setup” where they can log in and work remotely, hoping to ultimately replace “the few thousand human agents” that Klarna outsources now.

“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,” the CEO said.

As Bloomberg notes, Klarna had paused hiring for more than a year while it focused on developing its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. But Siemiatkowski said that strategy is no longer the right fit.

“As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” he said. “Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”

PYMNTS explored the limits of AI-powered customer service in a report earlier this year, noting that two years after the debut of ChatGPT, many customer-facing chatbots aren’t smarter. Rather, AI has been relegated to helping human workers research company policies and product information that they can pass along to customers.

“With concerns over reliability, more companies are restricting the usage of generative AI and opting for a more secure pathway,” Marlene Wolfgruber, computational linguist at ABBYY, told PYMNTS.

The report also notes that some high-profile cases have cast a shadow over using chatbots directly with the public, considering the potential financial and brand damage if the chatbot or AI agent hallucinates.

For example, there was a case in which Air Canada’s AI chatbot told customer Jake Moffatt that he could purchase a bereavement fare at full price first and get the discounted bereavement fare if requested within 90 days.

However, the chatbot was wrong. The airline had no such policy. Moffatt sued Air Canada and won, with the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal ruling that Air Canada could not separate itself from the AI chatbot

This isn’t to say that Klarna is abandoning AI. In a post on X in March, Siemiatkowski compared the growth of the technology to that of mobile devices, saying, “just like when mobile came along, we talked about mobile first, now you need to be AI first.”

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