Fintech
Klarna says 90% of its employees use generative AI on a daily basis
Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | LightRocket via Getty Images
Swedish financial technology company Klarna said Tuesday that nearly 9 in 10 of its 5,000 employees now use generative artificial intelligence tools in their daily work.
Klarna, which allows individuals to split their purchases into interest-free monthly installments, said more than 87% of its employees use generative AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its own in-house AI assistant.
The biggest users of generative AI in the enterprise are those in non-technical groups, such as communications (92.6%), marketing (87.9%) and legal (86.4%), Klarna said.
At these rates, Klarna is seeing much higher adoption of generative AI within the company than in the wider corporate world.
According to a survey according to the consultancy Deloitte, 61% of people who work with a computer use generative artificial intelligence programs in their daily work, sometimes without their direct superior’s knowledge.
Klarna has its own internal AI assistant, called Kiki.
According to the company, 85% of all its employees now use Kiki and the chatbot now answers an average of 2,000 questions per day.
Klarna said a key use of generative AI, namely OpenAI’s ChatGPT, by its communications teams has been to evaluate whether press articles written about the company are positive or negative.
Klarna lawyers use ChatGPT Enterprise, the enterprise-grade version of OpenAI’s technology, to create first drafts of common contract types, reducing the hours it takes to draft a contract.
“You still have to adapt it to make it work for your particular case, but instead of an hour you can draft a contract in ten minutes,” Selma Bogren, senior legal counsel at Klarna, said in a press release.
Klarna has touted AI as a big boon to its bottom line as the company has pushed to move its narrative away from the heady days of 2020 and 2021.
In those years, the environment for technology companies like Klarna was characterized by massive increases in hiring spending and growth at all costs, thanks to the availability of cheap capital.
In 2022, Klarna laid off approximately 10% of its global workforce in an effort to reduce costs and prepare its business for the economic turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The company’s valuation shrank 85% to $6.7 billion in 2022 compared to 2021.
Klarna has announced its decision to cut jobs en masse has borne fruitwhile the adoption of AI has allowed underlying businesses to become more profitable.
The company reported its first quarterly profit in four years for the September quarter, which it attributed to a reduction in credit losses and investments in artificial intelligence.
In February, Klarna said its AI chatbot was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service jobssaving the company $40 million.
The news has sparked interest in the shares of the French outsourcing giant Teleperformance plunge nearly 20% as investors feared that artificial intelligence would disrupt the company’s profitable call center business in the future.