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

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/18/buy-now-pay-later-klarna-ai-helped-halve-staff-boost-pay

6•pseudolus•1h ago

Comments

nobodyandproud•53m ago

Boost pay for the median or mean?

breckenedge•37m ago

> 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.

siva7•27m ago

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

piva00•3m ago

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".

nobodyandproud•20m ago

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.

Neil44•48m ago

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%.

kotaKat•28m ago

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.

breckenedge•31m ago

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!”

cjrp•26m ago

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?

svelle•25m ago

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-...

roxolotl•24m ago

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...

Show HN: Fixing a single pointer bug unlocked 1M+ row JSON parsing on Windows

EU Regulators Announce List of Critical ICT Third-Party Providers

New Crosh Window

Destroyer Escort vs. German 576-pound torpedo warhead

You Aren't in the DSM

Forever Object: The Staple-Less Oceanus Brass Stapler

Variance of a Sum

What Pixar's 'Wall-E' Got Right About the Future of Work

OpenAI is going to do a Trillion Dollar IPO

Rust edges toward CPython and older platforms won't like it

Existential threat of large language models to online survey research

Your Smartphone, Their Rules: App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship

Can a Time Capsule Outlast Geology?

Batteries, Not Natural Gas, Can Power the Data Center Boom

We Could Use a Good, Long Bear Market

Digital Omnibus: EU Commission wants to wreck core GDPR principles

Show HN: Sliprail – A cross-platform launcher with AI and extensions

Andrej Karpathy's amusing interaction with Gemini 3

The Peaceful Transfer of Power in Open Source Projects

Breakthrough in Antimatter Production

Kerala's (India) Blood Rain: When the Streets Turned Red in 2001

The Download: de-censoring DeepSeek, and Gemini 3

Hit by a Truck

Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board after release of emails with Epstein

The U.S. Mint is auctioning the last pennies–and they could sell for millions

LPLB: An early research stage MoE load balancer based on linear programming

One second to compute the largest Fibonacci number [video]

China is setting the pace in the EV race, and the West can't keep up

Stack Overflow for Teams Is Now Stack Internal

Everything Async, Nothing to Await: Automatic Concurrency in Par