Practical AI

Why Klarna's AI Experiment Matters: A Real-World Stress Test for the Automation Economy

• By Howard M. Cohen
• 10/22/2025

Klarna is a global technology company building the next-generation commerce network. Their mission is to reimagine how consumers spend and save in their daily lives by helping them save time, money, and reduce financial worry. With approximately 111 million active consumers and over 790,000 merchants across 26 countries, Klarna continues to redefine the commerce landscape by empowering merchants to grow and enhance consumers' lives with more sustainable products, fostering trust, and building deeper, more personal connections between shoppers and businesses.

Klarna is setting the standard for practical AI deployment—and the payoff is compounding fast. Since 2022, Klarna has streamlined its workforce by about 40% while raising the share of tech employees from 36% in 2022 to 52% in Q1 2025. 96% of employees use AI daily helping drive a 152% increase in revenue per employee since Q1'23 and putting Klarna on track to reach $1 million in revenue per employee. AI is slashing costs across the business, most noticeable in customer service, where costs per transaction have dropped by 40% since Q1'23 whilst maintaining customer satisfaction levels.

OpenAI Partnership Pays Off
Klarna's AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, is designed to enhance the shopping and payments experience for Klarna's 150 million consumers worldwide, capable of managing a range of tasks from multilingual customer service to managing refunds and returns, and fostering healthy financial habits.

Within the first month of go-live:

• The AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna's customer service chats
• It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents
• It is on par with human agents in regard to customer satisfaction score
• It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries
• Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously
• It's available in 23 markets, 24/7 and communicates in more than 35 languages
• It's estimated to drive a $40 million USD in profit improvement to Klarna in 2024

ChatGPT Enterprse Across the Organization
Klarna's adoption of AI hasn't been limited to its products. It extends deep into the organization as well. Klarna has made ChatGPT Enterprise available to all its employees around the globe, enabling access to the power of OpenAI in the familiar and easy-to-use ChatGPT interface, with protected company data.

• 90% of Klarna's employees are using generative AI tools powered by OpenAI daily
• Their success spans across the org, with Communications, Marketing, and Legal teams seeing adoption rates of 93%, 88%, and 86% respectively
• Klarna is seeing a wide variety of additional use cases, from building software to streamlining customer service

"This AI breakthrough in customer interaction means superior experiences for our customers at better prices, more interesting challenges for our employees, and better returns for our investors." Said Klarna Co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. "We are incredibly excited about this launch, but it also underscores the profound impact on society that AI will have."

Support for Google's Agen Payments Protocol (AP2)
Klarna has also announced its support for Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard designed to enable secure, agent-led payments across digital environments. The collaboration builds on Klarna's long-standing relationship with Google, which includes integrations with Google Pay, Chrome's autofill feature, Google Store, Google Play, and Google Cloud.

"Agent-led commerce represents an exciting new frontier, one that demands transparency, trust, and smarter payment experiences," said David Sykes, Chief Commercial Officer at Klarna. "We're doubling down on our long-standing relationship with Google to support their work with AP2 and help define an open, responsible payments architecture for the future of shopping."

"For years, we've been working with Klarna to help deliver secure, seamless, and innovative payment experiences," said Stavan Parikh, VP/GM, Payments, Google. "Their contributions to shape Agent Payments Protocol exemplify the critical cross-industry collaboration needed to build open, secure, and scalable frameworks to enable the future of commerce."

Klarna's role in AP2 reflects its evolution from payments provider to core infrastructure contributor for the next generation of commerce and marks the latest milestone in its ongoing work with Google to create more intelligent, secure, and intuitive shopping experiences worldwide.