In a remarkable stride towards enhancing productivity, up to 90% of Klarna staff now utilize generative AI daily. This surge in AI adoption is especially prominent among non-technical groups, with the Communications, Marketing, and Legal departments seeing adoption rates of 92.6%, 87.9%, and 86.4% respectively.
Klarna, a trailblazer in the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) sector, embraced AI early by developing a plugin for the ChatGPT generative AI bot released last year. This plugin offers shoppers personalized product recommendations, demonstrating Klarna’s commitment to integrating advanced technology both for its customers and internally.
The Rise of Kiki: Klarna’s Custom AI Assistant
Internally, the AI revolution at Klarna is powered by Kiki, a custom-built assistant leveraging OpenAI’s Large Language Models. Kiki answers approximately 2,000 staff queries daily, generating responses within 1 to 5 seconds. These answers are context-specific, providing personalized responses such as details on what a particular team is working on.
Kiki’s implementation has significantly boosted productivity by reducing the time spent on administrative tasks. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of Klarna, emphasizes that this allows employees to focus more on strategic and creative tasks. “We push everyone to test, test, test, and explore,” says Siemiatkowski. “As Klarna continues to discover applications for OpenAI’s tech, there’s the potential to take the business to new heights. We’re aimed at achieving a new level of employee empowerment, enhancing both our team’s performance and the customer experience.”
AI Across the Enterprise
AI’s influence extends beyond technical roles at Klarna, proving invaluable across various departments:
- Communications: The Communications team uses ChatGPT to conduct impartial sentiment analysis of press articles. Filippa Bolz, head of communications at Klarna, highlights the efficiency of their AI tool. “Media monitoring companies have tried for at least fifteen years to automate ‘sentiment’ analysis but often you’d get better results from blindfolded monkeys throwing darts. The tool we’ve built using ChatGPT has blown our minds! It provides a really objective analysis of each article in a couple of seconds, which helps us ensure we communicate clearly, that it is understood and resonates with each one of our target audiences – rather than bundling them together.”
- Legal: Klarna’s legal team employs ChatGPT Enterprise to draft common types of contracts. Selma Bogren, senior managing legal counsel at Klarna, praises the tool’s efficiency. “The big law firms have had a really great business just from providing templates for common types of contract. But ChatGPT is even better than a template because you can create something quite bespoke. Instead of spending an hour starting a contract from scratch or working from a template, I can tweak a ChatGPT draft in about ten minutes. You still need to adapt it to make it work for your particular case but instead of an hour you can draft a contract in ten minutes.”
A Future Powered by AI
Klarna’s widespread adoption of AI underscores its commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology to enhance productivity and efficiency. By empowering its employees with tools like Kiki and ChatGPT, Klarna not only optimizes its internal operations but also sets a precedent for how AI can be seamlessly integrated into various facets of a business. As the company continues to explore and expand AI applications, it is poised to achieve unprecedented levels of performance and customer satisfaction.