Klarna's OpenAI-Powered Support Assistant Automates Two-Thirds of Chats, Then Klarna Restores a Guaranteed Human Option

Klarna launched an AI customer service assistant built with OpenAI in February 2024, and within 30 days it had handled 2.3 million customer chats, automated 67% of conversations and taken on work equivalent to about 700 full-time agents, according to an analysis by the customer-support software company Twig published in March 2026 and updated in June 2026. Klarna's launch figures also included support in more than 35 languages, average resolution time falling from 11 minutes to under two, 25% fewer repeat inquiries and an estimated $40 million in avoided costs. Twig notes that the 700-agent figure referred to hiring Klarna avoided during growth, not layoffs. Twig describes the system as having four parts: a GPT-4-class OpenAI model with prompts and system instructions tuned for banking and buy-now-pay-later contexts; direct API integration with Klarna's account, transaction, payment-schedule and refund systems, so the assistant can read customer data and take actions such as rescheduling a payment or issuing a refund; a grounding corpus of help-centre content, policy documents and past ticket resolutions retrieved before each answer to reduce hallucination; and escalation logic that routes low-confidence and complex cases to human agents with context attached. Klarna has not disclosed its escalation thresholds or a full timeline; based on industry reporting, Twig estimates the build took about six months, with a beta in January 2024 in which responses were reviewed by humans before being sent. In May 2025 Klarna changed course and began rehiring human agents after complaints about generic answers and the assistant's handling of complicated cases. Chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company had cut too far, noting that "what you end up having is lower quality," and committed to an "Uber-type" model in which customers can always reach a human. Klarna reintroduced people for disputes, fraud and hardship cases, tightened confidence thresholds and improved handoffs. By the third quarter of 2025 the assistant was still doing the work of about 853 agents, with savings Twig puts at around $60 million.