Klarna hired the people back
In February 2024, Klarna told the world its OpenAI assistant was doing the work of 700 agents. The numbers held up: 2.3 million conversations in one month, resolution times down from 11 minutes to under 2, and an estimated 40 million dollars in annual savings. It was the most quoted proof that AI could take over a whole function.
Fifteen months later the same CEO changed his answer. By mid-2025 Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg the strategy had gone too far, described human service as something to reinvest in, and acknowledged that putting cost first had produced lower quality. Chapter 4 of CX+AI calls this the great divide, and Klarna sits on the wrong side of it.
Installing buys this year, integrating buys the climb
Installing an assistant buys you this year's cost base. Integrating it into how the work is organised buys you the rate of improvement, and improvement compounds. Klarna bought the cost base. The decision architecture the agents were part of stayed exactly where it was, so complex cases arrived at a handover point that nobody had designed.
Klarna is not alone in discovering that late. Sinch research published on 13 May 2026 found that 74 percent of enterprises with a live AI customer communications agent had rolled it back or shut it down after deployment, based on a survey of 2,527 senior decision makers run in January and February 2026.
A rollback is the invoice for a decision that was taken before anyone measured quality.
The counterexample that was measured properly
There is a controlled version of this experiment, and it came out the other way. Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond studied 5,172 support agents who were given an AI assistant alongside their work rather than being replaced by it. Productivity rose by roughly 15 percent. The least experienced agents improved by around 30 percent, and escalations and staff turnover both went down.
Same technology. Different design choice. The assistant was placed where the learning happens, so the organisation got better while the tool got used.
Agile already ran this film
Your business has seen this pattern before, under a different name. Roughly seven in ten agile transformations fail, while McKinsey puts the gain from a real one at about 30 percent. The ceremonies were cheap to install. The shift in who decides what, and on what evidence, was the expensive part, and that is the part that produces the 30 percent.
AI follows the same rule, faster. It multiplies whatever your process already is. A support flow with no clear escalation path gets a faster version of no clear escalation path.
What the customer feels within four messages
Your customer does not read your roadmap, she reads the first four messages. She finds out quickly whether this thing can carry her problem or is built to keep her away from someone who can. Klarna's reversal was not a technology verdict. The company moved to a model where AI takes routine, high-volume questions and people take everything that needs judgment.
For a smaller business without a data team, that split is your whole strategy:
- the questions where speed is the value;
- the questions where being understood is the value;
- the handover between them, written down and owned by a named person.
What you do on Monday
- Pull the last 100 customer conversations and sort them into speed-value and judgment-value. That sort is your deployment plan.
- Name the person who owns the handover from AI to human, with authority to change it this week.
- Define the quality measure before you scale anything: first-contact resolution on the judgment-value pile, reviewed weekly.
- Put the assistant next to your newest employee first, where the 30 percent gain in the Brynjolfsson study showed up.
- Book a date, eight weeks out, to decide whether this earns a second phase.
Chapter 4 of CX+AI works out the divide between installing and integrating in full, with the maturity levels and the six building blocks that carry a transformation. If you want to see where your own service flow sits before you spend anything, the CX+AI Maturity Check walks you through it in an afternoon. Bekijk het boek