Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Getting AI to Do the Work of 700 Customer Service Reps

In February, Sebastian Siemiatkowski boldly announced that Klarna’s new OpenAI-powered assistant handled two thirds of the Swedish fintech’s customer service chats in its first month. Not only were customer satisfaction metrics better, but by replacing 700 full-time contractors the bottom line impact is projected to be $40M. Since then, every company we talk to wants to know, “How do we get the Klarna customer support thing?”

Co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski tells us how the Klarna team shipped this new product in record time—and how embracing AI internally with an experimental mindset is transforming the company. He discusses how AI development is proliferating inside the company, from customer support to marketing to internal knowledge to customer-facing experiences. 

Sebastian also reflects on the impacts of AI on employment, society, and the arts while encouraging lawmakers to be open minded about the benefits.

Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital 

Mentioned in this episode:

DeepL: Language translation app that Sebastian says makes 10,000 translators in Brussels redundant

The Klarna brand: The offbeat optimism that the company is now augmenting with AI

Neo4j: The graph database management system that Klarna is using to build Kiki, their internal knowledge base

00:00 Introduction

01:57 Klarna’s business

03:00 Pitching OpenAI

08:51 How we built this

10:46 Will Klara ever completely replace its CS team with AI?

14:22 The benefits

17:25 If you had a policy magic wand…

21:12 What jobs will be most affected by AI?

23:58 How about marketing?

27:55 How creative are LLMs?

30:11 Klarna’s knowledge graph, Kiki

33:10 Reducing the number of enterprise systems

35:24 Build vs buy?

39:59 What’s next for Klarna with AI?

48:48 Lightning round