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Swedish fintech company Klarna said on Tuesday that nearly nine in 10 of its 5,000 employees now use generative artificial intelligence tools in their daily work.
Klarna, which lets individuals divide purchases into interest-free, monthly installments, says more than 87% of its employees are using generative AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its own in-house AI assistant.
Klarna said the largest users of generative AI in companies are non-technical groups such as communications (92.6%), marketing (87.9%) and legal (86.4%).
At this rate, Klarna is seeing much higher adoption of generative AI within the company than in the wider corporate world.
according to a poll According to a survey by consultancy Deloitte, 61% of computer workers use generative AI programs in their daily work, sometimes without their line managers realizing it.
Klarna has its own in-house AI assistant called Kiki.
According to the company, 85% of employees now use Kiki, and the chatbot now responds to an average of 2,000 queries per day.
Main uses of generative artificial intelligence
Klarna says its communications team’s key use of generative artificial intelligence, known as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is to assess whether the company’s news articles are positive or negative.
Lawyers at Klarna are using ChatGPT Enterprise, a commercial-grade version of OpenAI technology, to create first drafts of common types of contracts, reducing the time required to draft them.
Selma Bogren, senior managing counsel at Klarna, said in a press statement: “You still need to adapt it to suit your specific circumstances, but you can draft a contract in ten minutes instead of an hour.
The benefits of artificial intelligence for profit
Klarna has long viewed artificial intelligence as a major boon to its bottom line, and the company has worked hard to shift its narrative away from the heady days of 2020 and 2021.
During those years, tech companies like Klarna were operating in an environment characterized by huge increases in hiring spending and a drive to achieve growth at all costs thanks to the availability of cheap capital.
In 2022, Klarna laid off about 10% of its global workforce to reduce costs and prepare the business for the economic turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The company’s valuation in 2022 has shrunk by 85% from 2021 to $6.7 billion.
Klarna announces decision to make massive layoffs It’s already paying off, and the adoption of artificial intelligence has made its underlying business even more profitable.
The company posted its first quarterly profit in four years in the September quarter, which it attributed to lower credit losses and investments in artificial intelligence.
In February, Klarna said its artificial intelligence chatbot was filling 700 full-time customer service jobs and saving the company $40 million.
The news sent shares of French outsourcing giant Teleperformance down nearly 20% as investors worried that artificial intelligence would disrupt the company’s own profitable call center business in the future.
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