- Fintech firm Klarna says more than 87% of its employees are using generative AI tools, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and its own internal AI assistant.
- Klarna said the largest users of generative AI in the company are in non-technical groups, including communications (92.6%), marketing (87.9%) and legal (86.4%).
- Klarna is touting AI as a big boon to its bottom line as the company pushes to shift its narrative away from key dates in 2020 and 2021.
Swedish financial technology company Klarna said on Tuesday that nearly 9 out of 10 employees in its 5,000-strong workforce are now using artificial intelligence tools in their daily work.
Klarna, which lets people split their purchases into interest-free, monthly installments, said more than 87% of its employees are using generative AI tools, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and its own internal AI assistant.
Klarna said the highest users of generative AI in the company are those in non-technical groups, such as communications (92.6%), marketing (87.9%) and legal (86.4%).
At these rates, Klarna is seeing much greater adoption of generative AI within the company than in the wider corporate world.
According to a survey by consultancy firm Deloitte, 61% of people who work with computers use generative AI programs in their daily work – sometimes without their line managers being aware.
Klarna has its own internal AI assistant, called Kiki.
According to the firm, 85 percent of all its employees now use Kiki, and the chatbot now answers an average of 2,000 questions per day.
Key Uses of Generative AI
Klarna said a key use of generative AI — namely OpenAI's ChatGPT — was to evaluate whether press articles written about a company were positive or negative by its communications teams.
Klarna's lawyers are using ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-grade version of OpenAI's tech, to create first drafts of common types of contracts, reducing the hours it takes to draft a contract.
“You still need to adapt it to work for your specific case but instead of an hour you can have a contract in ten minutes,” Selma Bogren, Klarna's senior managing legal counsel, said in a press statement.
AI as a boon to the bottom line
Klarna is touting AI as a big boon to its bottom line as the company pushes to shift its narrative away from key dates in 2020 and 2021.
In those years, the environment for technology companies like Klarna was characterized by massive increases in spending and growth on hiring at all costs thanks to the availability of cheap capital.
In 2022, Klarna laid off about 10% of its global workforce in an effort to cut costs and prepare its business for the economic downturn caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The company's value fell 85% to $6.7 billion in 2021 from 2022.
Klarna has said that its decision to make massive job cuts has paid off, while its adoption of AI has made its core business more profitable.
The firm reported its first quarterly profit in four years for its September quarter, thanks to a reduction in credit losses as well as investments in AI.
In February, Klarna said its AI chatbot was replacing 700 full-time customer service jobs, saving the firm $40 million.
The news sent shares of French outsourcing giant Teleperformance down nearly 20 percent as investors worried that AI would disrupt the company's profitable call center business in the future.