This Company Replaced Workers With Ai. Now They’re Looking For Humans Again.

Two years after bragging that artificial intelligence could do the work of 700 employees, Swedish fintech giant Klarna is quietly backpedaling—by asking some of those same humans to return.

In 2023, Klarna stopped hiring altogether. By 2024, it had partnered with OpenAI, slashed customer service and marketing departments, and publicly declared that “AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do,” according to CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. The company was quick to celebrate its $10 million in savings, claiming generative AI could handle translations, image production, data analysis—and customer complaints.

But now, the buy-now-pay-later platform seems to be rethinking that bet.

“From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg recently. That’s a stark contrast to his earlier enthusiasm for automation, and a whispered acknowledgment that Klarna’s AI-first approach didn’t exactly win over users.

Company That Replaced Its Workers With AI Regrets Everything

The shift comes after a rough stretch of customer frustration and diminishing returns. While AI may be efficient, it turns out it’s not great at handling nuance, empathy, or angry customers yelling about missed payments. “Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor…what you end up having is lower quality,” the CEO admitted.

The company’s employee count dropped from over 5,500 in 2022 to just 3,400 by the end of 2023. Now, Klarna is reportedly considering an “Uber-style” hiring model—bringing in gig workers to handle customer service from home—effectively re-humanizing the jobs it once cut, just with less stability.

Klarna isn’t the only company experiencing AI whiplash. Duolingo recently announced it would stop using human contractors in favor of automation, while CrowdStrike drew criticism for gutting its workforce and replacing employees with AI just weeks before a global IT outage.

Meanwhile, surveys show that many corporate leaders aren’t thrilled with how automation is going. Over half of UK business leaders who rushed to replace human jobs with AI say they now regret it. A Carnegie Mellon study found that even the “best” AI workers could only complete about a quarter of basic tasks.

The future of work may still involve AI—but Klarna’s regret is a clear reminder that replacing people entirely might be harder (and messier) than it looks.

The post This Company Replaced Workers With AI. Now They’re Looking for Humans Again. appeared first on VICE.