Financial company Klarna wants to replace 2 thousand employees with artificial intelligence

Swedish fintech company Klarna, which provides online financial services such as payments for online stores, direct payments, and payments after purchase, wants to cut 2,000 employees in favor of artificial intelligence. This is reported by the International Business Times.

Over the past year, the company has already laid off more than 1,000 employees, and now plans to cut another 50% of its staff, or about 2,000 people. The reason for this is artificial intelligence, which has been used to automate tasks.

A company representative said that the number of employees is planned to be reduced to about 2,000 over the next few years. The replacement of employees with artificial intelligence was announced during the interim financial report.

Klarna claims that its AI-powered chatbot can do the work that used to be done by 700 support staff. The company has also reduced the time to resolve user requests from 11 minutes to 2 minutes, while maintaining customer satisfaction.

In addition to replacing support staff, Klarna also uses artificial intelligence for marketing and sales.

"Our AI assistant now also serves as a powerful shopping assistant that helps consumers discover and choose products tailored to them, further transforming the shopping experience and helping them save time and money," the company said.

Interestingly, the reductions were not due to layoffs, but to natural staff turnover and a hiring freeze introduced last year.

Klarna's interim financial results show a 27% increase in revenue. The company earned SEK 13.3 billion and managed to turn SEK 456 million in losses from the previous year into SEK 673 million in profit in 2024.