Klarna says AI drive has helped halve staff numbers and boost pay | Hacker News Reader

Klarna says AI drive has helped halve staff numbers and boost pay

theguardian.com

12 pointspseudolus16 comments

As this is their third flip flop on AI[0][1] I assume this is likely Klarna trying to distract from the fundamental issues in their model.[2]

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/klarna-ceo-sebastian-siemiat...

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2025/05/18/bu...

2: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4844344-klarna-and-affirm-t...

I'm guessing the staffing losses are concentrated at the lowest paid end, which is why getting rid of them has seen average comp increase by 60%.

Bingo. What roles and positions still even exist at this point at Klarna on the “low” end? It’s certainly not a customer-service facing role at that point.

Hire an expensive AI Software engineer to replace 2-3 lower paid employees... that will reduce staff count and boost average pay, but is it better overall?

"had managed to increase revenues by 108%"

This sounds less than the consumer price inflation over the period.

Boost pay for the median or mean?

> with average compensation – including employee-related taxes and pension contributions – rising by 60% over the past three year

> Average compensation for each employee has jumped from $126,000 (£96,000) in 2022 to $203,000 today, Klarna said.

If I get 10K and my boss gets 400K - our average compensation will be just above the mentioned 203K. But there are some small details, you see...

It’s coffee time in my area so my mental faculties aren’t up to speed, but that doesn’t seem to answer my question.

Wait, they pay 200k as a swedish company to staff? Can someone inside confirm?

I highly doubt it, I know several people who worked (and some who still work) there, no way that's the median compensation for the staff in R&D.

Quick edit: now I see they are adding the pensions into that calculation, tjänstepension is something every company in Sweden has to pay, it doesn't make sense to include it as part of the "average compensation".

>[...] it doesn't make sense to include it as part of the "average compensation".

Unless you want to artificially boost your numbers to sound better in the press release.

Average of costs of compensation - "including employee-related taxes and pension contributions".

The employee sees around half of that. But there must be more to it, since it is still an unrealistic number.

Didn't Klarna say they'd replaced all of their customer service reps with AI, and then had to backtrack and rehire them when the AI was doing a terrible job?

Yes. Although it seems they didn't rehire, but just reassigned people from other parts of the org.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/14/klarna-ceo-says-ai-helped-co...

https://www.businessinsider.com/klarna-reassigns-workers-to-...

There’s really nothing in the article that speaks to savings due to “AI” per se, and the timeline really doesn’t work out. I suspect this is just another executive wanting to jump on claiming “we’re AI now!”

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