

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Getting AI to Do the Work of 700 Customer Service Reps
About this episode
From the show’s notesIn 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.
Read the show’s notes in full
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












