Dive Brief:
- Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski plans, long term, to reduce the buy now, pay later company's headcount and reliance on customer service outsourcing, he said during a wide-ranging conversation with “20VC” podcast host Harry Stebbings earlier this week.
- The company is having its AI assistant answer easy customer questions and is turning to an Uber style set-up to make human assistance a “VIP experience,” he said, speaking about his AI customer service strategy.
- Instead of only relying on contractors to provide customer service agents, Klarna is recruiting customer service agents directly from its customer base, Siemiatkowski said. “Just like somebody can go and drive an Uber for a while, they can actually jump on and work for Klarna’s customer service,” he said. “These are our most passionate customers. They love our product, they love how it works. They know Klarna in and out. And now they earn extra money by actually working on our customer service.”
Dive Insight:
When Klarna announced its AI customer service agent could do the work of 700 full-time agents in 2024, the public was none too pleased, Siemiatkowski acknowledged.
“In this case also, when we announced this, we obviously had some people being very frustrated with us, like, ‘You're laying people off because of AI.’ People were angry to some degree as well,” he said.
The Klarna founder said that people were not laid off — the company simply stopped using outsourced customer service agents.
“Now, because we don’t hire these people ourselves — they work for customer service companies — they just shifted and started working on over,” he said. “So fortunately in that situation nobody lost their job, but it was like an eye opener for us.”
The company could shift to an AI agent because customers were frequently calling in with simple questions, such as, “Hey, did I pay Klarna?” he said.
But in 2025, the company tried to shift its messaging around AI. In May, Klarna recognized the importance of human assistance, began hiring human agents again, and shifted away from focusing on cost too much, Siemiatkowski said.
“But what we were trying to say a little bit later on is that… if AI can do customer service, it means it’s going to be the cheap customer service,” he said. “It’s going to be the one that everyone gets because it’s cheap and simple.”
Siemiatkowski compared it to the mass production of furniture. As factories started producing cheap furniture, more people came to appreciate artisan furniture, he said. Customers will view human connection in support similarly.
“We said the future of VIP experience will be the human connection, the relationship,” he said. “But to some degree when I challenge it internally, I said, look what I’ve seen has happened is also too much focus on cost. There’s been too much focus on that. We have to rethink this and make customer service this human part of what Klarna is and make sure that we offer everyone who wants a human connection.”
Siemiatkowski sees the Uber-style strategy as a success, saying that customer satisfaction with Klarna-hired agents are “through the roof.”
The company hasn’t just looked to reduce its reliance on human customer service agents. The company has shrunk its headcount by more than 50%, from 7,000 to 3,000, by using AI. By 2030, Siemiatkowski expects headcount to shrink to under 2,000.
