The company decided to replace customer support with AI, but the plan quickly got out of hand. In the end, programmers were forced to “change their shoes” into call center operators.
Swedish giant Klarna, which allows you to pay for purchases in installments, initially boasted that it no longer needed live employees. After all, algorithms could handle the work of “700 full-time agents.” In 2024, the company’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski claimed that the experiment with “artificial intelligence agents” allowed them not to hire new employees for a year. The firm presented this as a breakthrough: automation saved millions and helped avoid staff costs.
However, in May 2025, it became clear that the scheme was getting out of control. Problems with algorithms forced the company to urgently return people to support. But, as they say, breaking is not rebuilding. And, as it turned out, reassembling a department of 700 employees is not the same as laying them off. As a result, even those who had nothing to do with it ended up working in call centers: programmers, marketers, and anyone else who was available.
After the failure, Semiatkovsky changed his tone dramatically. If he used to dream of “completely replacing people with algorithms,” he now promises that Klarna will become “the best company where there will always be someone to talk to.” We had to back off from loud statements about AI, as we felt too painfully that The artificial intelligence industry is living on borrowed time, and it is not certain that it will be able to pay it back.
This story is not only relevant to Klarna itself. For example, former OpenAI employees conducted an experiment: they entrusted AI with responsibility for a kiosk. As a result, they lost money and AI assured me that he was a real person who urgently needed to attend a business meeting at the Simpsons’ address. In addition, according to recent polls, 95% of attempts to implement generative AI in companies fail. Less than half of American executives are confident that their companies will be able to successfully complete the automation process. Klarna faced this problem publicly and in a rather embarrassing way
Source: Futurism
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