Klarna was one of the first firms out of the gate when the ChatGPT generative AI bot was released last year, building a plugin to provide shoppers with personalised product recommendations.

Internally, the AI revolution at the BNPL giant is being propelled by Kiki, a custom-built assistant using OpenAI's Large Language Models to answer staff queries. With 2,000 questions answered daily, Kiki generates answers to a wide range of topics within 1 to 5 seconds, and answers are context dependent. So the answer to ‘what is my team working on’ will be personalised to the person asking the question.

The bot noy only boosts productivity but also reduces the time dedicated to administrative tasks, says Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder at Klarna, freeing up employees to concentrate on strategic and creative tasks.

“We push everyone to test, test, test and explore,” he says. “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 is also being used across the enterprise by non-technical teams, such as the firm's communications department which uses ChatGPT to impartially evaluate whether press articles are positive or negative for the company.

Filippa Bolz, head of communications at Klarna, says: “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.”

Klarna’s lawyers are also using ChatGPT Enterprise to create the first draft of common types of contract, significantly reducing the time it takes to draw up a contract.

Selma Bogren, senior managing legal counsel at Klarna, says: “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.”