[gregdoesit]

Either Klarna is really good at pulling strings to get media coverage, or mainstream media does not fact checking themselves. About a year ago, the company was everywhere in the media when its CEO announced that it created an AI bot that is doing the equivalent of 700 fulltime customer service folks.

I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.

I was... not impressed?

Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)

I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?

My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-chatbot/

[darth_avocado]

I think this is in the broader context of Klarna CEO claiming he had stopped hiring for almost a year because of AI. It was a big talking point for a lot of CEOs and LinkedIn influencers. Big enough that incompetent management across the industry was following Klarna’s steps and reducing staffing (Not because AI, but because they could short staff teams with AI as an excuse). That is why when there is a clear evidence that Klarna was completely wrong, it needs to be talked about.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42432494

[iforgetti]

Glen Okun of NYU business school has written about BNPL loan portfolio weakness.

The AI marketing is just an attempt to reframe the value narrative of the company before IPO. They would rather be seen as an AI company than an unsecured lender of last resort.

The narrative on Klarna’s core business is not good in any case, either an extractive lender benefiting from people buying what they may not afford and charging exorbitant interest or a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio. Neither is preferential to them compared to a value narrative framing them as an AI company. Likely the market is too skeptical in this environment to take the bait however.

[subtlesoftware]

If you default on your Klarna loan, you could pay them back in support hours:

> The pilot has started small, with two of the new breed of customer-service agents live now, but the ambition is to tap into candidates such as students or rural populations. “We also know there are tons of Klarna users that are very passionate about our company and would enjoy working for us,” he added.

[from the bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08/klarna-tu...]

[spaceman_2020]

I can't believe it takes b-school professors to figure out that people financing their DoorDash might not be the best people to lend money to.

[blibble]

> a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio.

I thought they more or less instantly offloaded the risk as asset backed securities to clueless people who didn't know the actual risk profile what they were buying

sound familiar?

[Freak_NL]

They are scum, and currently are suffering from increased scrutiny from governments for pushing their buy-now-pay-later exploitative business everywhere. In the Netherlands they are even attempting to gain access to brick-and-mortar stores by partnering with Adyen¹ which provides the payment solutions, but the government is being vocal about that being unwanted. This is in addition to the unabating coverage in the media about how Klarna is about as harmless as vaping — that is, they are enticing young people into buying stuff they don't need² before they can afford it.

Shopkeepers don't want it, but fear they must if big chains start offering it, just as online shops feel like offering it is unavoidable due to the popularity in certain demographics. The financial watchdog doesn't like Klarna, and is increasing scrutiny³.

If Klarna has trouble marketing their value, then that at least is good news, but not unsurprising given the spate of attention it received over the last two years.

1: So much for the ethical side of Adyen (e.g., https://www.adyen.com/impact sounds hollow when you partner with loan sharks).

2: Some people are quick to defend Klarna for offering people a chance to buy their necessities with what amounts to a payday loan, but that is bullshit. Klarna predominantly is not used for daily necessities.

3: Klarna now has to state that they are offering a loan in the Netherlands where they are available as payment option, with the mandatory "borrowing money costs money" tag-line.

[dreamcompiler]

WeWork tried this and it worked out great for their CEO. They were a real estate landlord masquerading as a tech company. Stupid SoftBank bought that lie and made Neumann filthy rich.

But as you say that was ZIRP when everybody was stupid and this is now.

[vrosas]

To be fair, admitting their amateur foray into chatbots was an abject failure and rolling it back really does put them at the forefront of the AI movement.

[Avicebron]

The problem with "AI-first" companies is that they really are just shells for people who want to be "AI-First" engineers, and not "guy who solved my problem affordably and was nice" engineers. The average person doesn't care how you ended up fixing the weird charge on their account, it's how fast and how proficiently did you fix it

[pjc50]

> mainstream media does not fact checking themselves.

Mainstream media will print a press release for you if you send it to them. It is very important to understand how limited the fact checking really is. If a mainstream paper prints a statement of the form "X said Y", you can be sure that:

- they are pretty good at checking that person X did actually say Y

- they make no effort whatsoever to fact check the underlying statement Y.

There isn't really the money or interest in actually investigating the claims of every little press release.

> really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue

Yes. This is because multibillion dollar investments are made by people who are easily distracted by the jangling keys of AI.

[cosmicgadget]

I liked your comment but don't think the shot at media was necessary. A company replacing workers is news enough and the fact checking need only be to validate that information. The "as good as 700 workers" I assume was presented as a claim, not a fact.

Evaluating the effectiveness of the AI bot is another matter and firmly in the investigative journalism sphere. Coincidentally that is an awesome application of a blog.

[AznHisoka]

Sorry, but its attitudes like yours that make it easy for media to keep spouting out ridiculous claims/lies, and get away with it.

Shots are absolutely necessary when its warranted. Full. Stop.