Steven Bartlett

And so when we talked about AI in the past and people mentioned Sebastian and Klarna as the example, I wanted to clarify with him what the truth was.

He said, it's great to hear from you.

I think sometimes people struggle with two things can be true at the same time.

I think it might be time to come back on your podcast.

To your point, this is the media misinterpreting my tweet.

We are doubling down on AI more than ever.

Klarna is shrinking with almost 100 employees per month due to AI.

We used to be 7,400 at the peak.

A year ago, 5,500.

Now, we're 3,300.

And by the end of summer, so this was last year, we'll be 3,000 people.

AI handles 70% of our customer service conversations at this moment.

This is because we have realized that with AI, the production cost of software comes down to almost zero.

Just like manufacturing used to be all handcrafted, and then the machines came, code used to be all handcrafted up until a few years ago, and now it is machine produced.

And ultimately, we pay people more than ever for the unique handcrafted man-made stuff.

Klarna is a bank.

People will want to connect to humans, not only machines.

They want us to be personable,

Relatable, even flawed.

So we need to make sure while we are automating, replacing with AI in parallel, we make sure we offer a super available human experience.