Klarna’s Measly AI Savings

How much money can AI save a business? That’s a hugely important question for businesses nowadays—uncertainty about the answer is holding up wider adoption of various new AI products, as we described on several fronts this week. (See this piece on Salesforce’s struggles in selling its new AI agent tool, and these other two stories on the same theme). And on this point, a securities filing by the installment lender Klarna today for its planned initial public offering doesn’t exactly make the best case for AI as a cost saver.

More than almost any other company, Klarna executives have talked loudly about how using AI has saved it money. But the savings outlined in its IPO filing seem pitifully small. For instance, the filing said that an AI assistant that did the equivalent work of more than 800 full time human staffers “delivered $39 million of cost savings in 2024.” AI helped Klarna save $2.6 million on marketing suppliers in the first quarter of last year. “AI-powered marketing” saved another $2.5 million in the first quarter of 2024. An AI tool that automated a critical and time consuming task on the engineering side saved $4.8 million last year. None of those figures seem like much for a company whose total expenses last year were $2.9 billion.