AI Took Their Jobs, But Swedish Fintech Now Wants Human Workforce Back

There have been long-going discussions about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will place human workforce, with some agreeing with the fact and others arguing that technology cannot replace humans. This scenario has been explained well through the recent example of a Swedish fintech giant ‘Klarna’. The company has taken u-turn on its recruitment drive as it plans to re-hire humans due to missing “human touch” in the job.

According to a report in Futurism, the fintech company providing “buy now, pay later” loan services had pivoted towards AI and partenered with OpenAI to reduce headcount for better efficiency. However, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has now admitted the “low quality” of work done by the AI agents and the importance of human touch.

“From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it’s so critical that you were clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you wanted. Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organising this, what you end up having is lower quality,” the fintech company’s CEO said as quoted by Futurism.

Klarna halted all hiring in 2023 as it significantly expanded the use of AI across its operations. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski at one point claimed the company had saved $10 million in marketing by relying on generative AI for tasks such as translation, content creation, and data analysis.

In December 2024, he stated that “AI can already do all the jobs that we, as humans, do”. Klarna also revealed that AI systems were handling the workload equivalent to 700 customer service agents.

The company’s IPO prospectus filed in March revealed that Klarna’s full-time workforce shrank from 5,527 employees at the end of December 2022 to 3,422 by the same time in 2023.

Klarna isn’t alone in leveraging AI to streamline operations and cut jobs. Just this month, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike—recently in the spotlight for a major global IT outage—revealed plans to lay off 5% of its workforce, replacing those roles with AI-driven solutions.

Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, is also shifting gears. The company announced it will gradually phase out contractors for tasks that can now be handled by AI, the report said.

Citing a precedent from 2012 when it bet heavily on mobile technology, Duolingo defended the move as a strategic evolution. Beyond ending its reliance on contractors, the company will also adopt AI for evaluating performance reviews. New hires, it added, will only be considered in cases where automation isn’t a viable option.