Klarna, a buy now, pay later solution headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, has revolutionized online shopping. Their software enables retailers to facilitate both purchases and installment payments from their E-commerce sites or, increasingly, at point-of-sale terminals. 

Founded in 2005, Klarna secured funding from Venture Capital to expand globally. However, achieving profitability proved challenging. Klarna’s primary obstacle was onboarding new customers, necessitating custom software connections for each implementation. Moreover, providing customer support to a consumer-facing solution hindered profitability.

The answer — rapid adoption of AI or the company would face an uncertain future. By February 2024, Klarna announced that two thirds of all chat with customer service was being handled by AI.  The result was within one month, the AI chatbots were doing the work of 700 customer service agents. AI chat was more accurate than humans resulting in a 25% drop in repeat request on issues. It’s available in 35 languages, 24/7 and is estimated to save the company $40 million in its first year. Given this success, the company embarked on further AI deployments.

“This AI breakthrough in customer interaction means superior experiences for our customers at better prices, more interesting challenges for our employees, and better returns for our investors,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna. “We are incredibly excited about this launch, but it also underscores the profound impact on society that AI will have. We want to reemphasize and encourage society and politicians to consider this carefully, and believe a considerate, informed, and steady stewardship will be critical to navigate through this transformation of our society”

Fast forward to May 2024 — now 90% of all Klarna employees are using AI daily. Communications, marketing, and legal teams are leading the adoption. The company has developed an AI assistant named Kiki that boosts the productivity of employees. Kiki answers 2,000 employee questions daily which are then used to shape the large language models further. In the marketing department, AI is used to generate copy for 80% of campaigns.  

The latest bold move is that Klarna has now canceled their Salesforce and Workday software contracts and announced they will cut their workforce in half and pay the half they keep more as they look to be more productive with AI based tools.

Klarna now plans for IPO in 2025 as their path to profitability has been enabled with broad AI adoption and worker productivity across the company.

Takeaway — AI adoption brings disruptive change to companies allowing them to fundamentally change their business models. Think of how your company or competitors may be working to deploy these solutions. Will you be ready? The question is not IF your company should use AI but how and when! If you want to learn more about how your company may deploy AI, we invite you to participate in a call with a Sciata representative and learn more about how you may shift the dynamic at your company.

Source: Klarna website