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Swedish financial technology company Klarna said on Tuesday that nearly 9 in 10 of its 5,000 employees now use generative artificial intelligence tools in their daily work.
Klarna, which allows individuals to split their purchases into interest-free monthly payments, said more than 87% of its employees use generative AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its own internal AI assistant.
According to Klarna, the largest users of generative AI at the company are employees in non-technical groups such as communications (92.6%), marketing (87.9%) and legal (86.4%).
At this rate, Klarna is seeing much greater adoption of generative AI within the company than in the broader corporate world.
According to survey According to consulting firm Deloitte, 61% of people who work with computers use generative artificial intelligence programs in their daily work – sometimes without the knowledge of their immediate supervisor.
Klarna has her own internal AI assistant named Kiki.
According to the company, 85% of all its employees now use Kiki, and the chatbot now answers an average of 2,000 queries per day.
Key Applications of Generative AI
Klarna said a key aspect of its communications teams’ use of generative AI, namely ChatGPT OpenAI, was determining whether press articles written about a company were positive or negative.
Klarna lawyers use ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-grade version of OpenAI technology, to create early drafts of common contract types, reducing the time it takes to draft a contract.
“You’ll still have to tailor it to work for your specific case, but instead of an hour, you can write a contract in ten minutes,” Selma Bogren, senior managing counsel at Klarna, said in a press statement.
AI as a boon for profit
Klarna is touting AI as a major boon to its bottom line as it seeks to move its story away from the heady days of 2020 and 2021.
The environment back then for tech companies like Klarna was characterized by massive increases in hiring costs and growth at any cost thanks to the availability of cheap capital.
Klarna laid off about 10% of its global workforce in 2022 to cut costs and prepare its business for the economic disruption caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The company’s 2022 valuation fell 85% to $6.7 billion compared to 2021.
Klarna said its decision to make massive job cuts had paid off, with the introduction of AI allowing its core business to become more profitable.
The firm reported its first quarterly profit in four years in the September quarter, which it attributed to a reduction in credit losses as well as investments in artificial intelligence.
In February, Klarna said its AI chatbot was filling 700 full-time customer service jobs, saving the company $40 million.
The news sent shares of French outsourcing giant Tele Performance tumbling nearly 20% as investors feared AI would disrupt the company’s lucrative call center business in the future.