A Payments Company Says Its AI Assistant Is Doing the Work of 700 Customer-Service Employees

Klarna, the Swedish 'buy now, pay later' firm, said the chatbot it built with OpenAI handled two-thirds of its customer chats in its first month, resolving issues faster and with fewer repeat contacts than human agents. It expects a $40 million profit improvement this year.

Klarna, the Swedish company that lets shoppers split purchases into installments, said today that an AI assistant it launched a month ago has handled 2.3 million customer conversations — about two-thirds of the total — and is "doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents." The company says the assistant resolves questions in about two minutes, versus eleven for a human, that customers come back with the same problem less often, and that satisfaction scores are the same. It expects the change to improve its profit by about $40 million this year.

The assistant is built on OpenAI's technology and works in 23 languages, handling refunds, returns, payment problems, and the like. Klarna's chief executive, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, has been unusually direct about what it means: the company stopped hiring last year, he has said, and expects to keep shrinking through attrition as the software does more.

The 700 figure is the one that will travel, and it deserves a caveat: Klarna did not lay off 700 people. Its customer service is largely outsourced, and the work went to a contractor's employees whose hours were cut. The number is a calculation, not a headcount. But it is the first time a company has put a specific figure on jobs replaced by a chatbot, and it did so in a press release, as good news.

The announcement comes fourteen months after ChatGPT launched. The question of whether these programs would take jobs has, until today, been answered mostly by economists' estimates. Today it was answered by a company's accountants.