Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Sebastian Siemiatkowski (born 1981) is a Swedish entrepreneur who co-founded Klarna in Stockholm in 2005 and built it into a global buy-now-pay-later giant. In the ChatGPT era he repositioned himself as tech’s most eager AI adopter, volunteering Klarna as what he called OpenAI’s favorite guinea pig.

700 agents, one chatbot

In February 2024 Klarna announced that its OpenAI-powered assistant had handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month — two-thirds of all customer-service chats — doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents with customer-satisfaction scores on par with humans, and an expected $40 million profit boost. The company had laid off roughly 700 people in 2022, and Siemiatkowski paired the announcement with a hiring freeze, letting attrition shrink the workforce from about 5,000 toward 3,000 as AI absorbed the work.

By May 2025 came the walk-back that launched a thousand think-pieces. Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg that focusing too hard on cost had produced “lower quality” support, and Klarna began recruiting remote human agents again in an Uber-style flexible pool, promising customers a human would always be reachable. “Really, investing in the quality of human support is the way of the future for us,” he said. Critics cast it as proof that AI-replaces-humans triumphalism collapses on contact with reality.

But the correction was a rebalancing, not a retreat: the AI assistant still handles the majority of Klarna’s chats, Siemiatkowski still tells investors AI lets the company halve its headcount while growing, and he even sent an AI avatar of himself to present quarterly earnings in 2025.