Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has set the record straight on reports that his company ditched Salesforce and replaced it with AI.
The story originally broke in August of last year when Seeking Alpha reported on Klarna's quarterly investor call.
During the call, Siemiatkowski mentioned that Klarna had "shut down Salesforce" as one of its SaaS providers.
Given the company’s strong association with OpenAI and outward championing of the tech, rumors began to spread that Klarna had used AI and LLMs to take over from Salesforce’s platform.
Indeed, the story gained such momentum that it appeared to cause something of a rift between the two companies, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff using a Dreamforce press conference to question the decision and call out Klarna’s customer data management.
But what really happened? Siemiatkowski has now come out and shared all.
Klarna’s Side of the Story
In a post on X, Siemiatkowski has revealed that the whole ordeal left him feeling “tremendously embarrassed.”
The Klarna man explained that the company had indeed experimented with AI and LLMs to help discern what data held real value, what was duplicated, inaccurate, or conflicting, and why.
In doing so, the company concluded that Klarna’s knowledge – spanning its identity, goals, performance, relationships, workforce, and insights – was fragmented across various SaaS platforms.
The buy-now-pay-later specialist also realized that while certain enterprise features – such as auditing, versioning, and access control – were essential, they had also become fragmented.
To address this, Klarna began consolidating systems, connecting knowledge, and eliminating silos, which led to the infamous Salesforce shutdown, as Siemiatkowski explains: "The side consequence of this was the liquidation of SaaS – not all of them, but a lot of them.
So no, we did not replace SaaS with an LLM, and storing CRM data in an LLM would have its limitations. But we developed an internal tech stack, using Neo4j and other things, to start bringing data=knowledge together.
It is important to note that while many organizations did lead with the narrative that Klarna was replacing Salesforce with AI, CX Today actually debunked these claims last year.
The publication revealed that Klarna had transitioned to Deel as its HR platform and integrated various SaaS tools to replace its CRM functionality.
Moreover, despite moving away from Salesforce’s CRM apps, Klarna continued using Slack, maintaining its partnership with Salesforce.
This clarification was shared with CX Today after numerous reports had misinterpreted Siemiatkowski’s remarks, suggesting Klarna was replacing SaaS apps entirely with AI.
Instead, the company confirmed that it was adopting alternative SaaS solutions, consolidating capabilities, and enhancing them with AI.
