Klarna is backpedaling after cutting hundreds of human jobs and replacing them with artificial intelligence. The Swedish buy-now-pay-later company now says real people are essential to customer service and plans to bring them back—but in a gig-style setup.

From All-In on AI to Human Reboot
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, once eager to make the company OpenAI’s “favorite guinea pig,” is now rethinking that approach. “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,” he told Bloomberg.

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Reality Check for AI
This change comes after increasing signs that AI can't fully handle human-facing tasks. Siemiatkowski admitted to Bloomberg that Klarna went too far. “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.


Investor Chamath Palihapitiya called Klarna's move a warning for the tech sector. He wrote on X that the company’s shift could force many startups to pivot to simply “use AI for narrow use cases” and warned that replacing humans with “probabilistic code” is “fraught with edge cases.”