Klarna reversed its AI-first customer service strategy after quality complaints

Klarna·Klarna's OpenAI-powered customer service assistant

Klarna deployed an AI assistant to handle customer support chats, claiming in February 2024 that it did the work of 700 agents and handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month, and froze human customer-service hiring for over a year; by May 2025 the CEO told Bloomberg the AI-first approach produced "lower quality" support and Klarna resumed hiring humans.

Blast radius

Headcount fell 22% to 3,500 employees during the AI-first push; the company then reversed course and began recruiting a new batch of human customer service staff to guarantee customers a human option.

Root cause

Full automation of customer support chat removed human judgment and empathy, and measured service quality declined as AI handled a growing share of conversations.

How it was caught

Publicly acknowledged by Klarna's own CEO in an interview after prolonged customer and market scrutiny of the AI-first strategy.

What changed

Klarna resumed hiring human customer service agents and repositioned quality human support, alongside AI, as a differentiator.

Take-awayMeasure support-quality metrics continuously when automating customer service, and keep a human fallback path before scaling an agent to most of your chat volume.