Cut workforce from ~5,000 to ~3,000 employees between 2022 and 2024, eliminating ~700 customer service roles replaced by an OpenAI-powered AI assistant. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski froze hiring for over a year citing AI capacity. By early 2025, customer satisfaction dropped and Klarna admitted AI had gone "too far," beginning to rehire human staff. Reframed as AI augmentation after initial full-replacement experiment backfired.