Klarna Eliminates 700 Customer Service Roles, Claims AI Now Does the Work of 700 Agents

Klarna announced this week that its AI customer service assistant now handles the equivalent of 700 full-time agents' workload, and the company has reduced its customer service headcount accordingly.

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski called it "a watershed moment" in the company's earnings call, citing a 25% reduction in repeat enquiries and average resolution times dropping from 11 minutes to under 2 minutes.

But the picture from the other side of the conversation is different.

Autominous spoke to 23 Klarna customers who filed complaints with consumer protection agencies in the UK, Germany, and Sweden over the past six months. Seventeen described interactions where the AI assistant provided incorrect information about payment schedules, applied late fees that should have been waived, or entered circular conversation loops that prevented escalation to a human agent.

"It kept telling me my payment was received when it wasn't," said one UK customer who asked not to be named. "When I asked to speak to a person, it said it could help me and started the same script again. I was trapped in a loop for 40 minutes before I gave up and called my bank."

Five former Klarna customer service employees, all made redundant in the past year, described a system where the AI was deployed before it was ready.

"We were told to train the model by feeding it our best conversations," said one former employee based in Stockholm. "But the model couldn't do what we did. We could hear when someone was upset. We could make a judgment call. The AI just follows the policy document, and the policy document doesn't cover edge cases."

Klarna's reported metrics measure speed and volume. They do not measure whether the customer's actual problem was solved.