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LEADERSHIP
customer service agents and had fielded 2.3 million conversations in a single month. The market swooned. Klarna froze hiring and let the savings do the talking. Then the wheels came off. Service quality slipped, customers noticed, and by 2025 Chief Executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski was on Bloomberg performing a rare climbdown.“ We went too far,” he says. The obsession with cost had brought“ lower quality, and that’ s not sustainable”. Klarna began rehiring the very humans it had so publicly retired. Klarna is only the visible face of MIT’ s invisible 95 %. Most disappointments never trend. They simply fail to surface in the numbers, a slow leak of capital wearing the costume of transformation. For every project killed in daylight, dozens die in the dark, and the bill for the profligacy lands, as always, on finance.
We went too far... which lowered quality, and that’ s not sustainable
Sebastian Siemiatkowski Co-Founder and CEO Klarna
Funding the five percent There is, mercifully, a cheat sheet for landing in that lucky 5 %, instead of setting money on fire with everyone else. Buying AI tools from specialist vendors and partnering up paid off about two-thirds of the time, MIT found, while the do-it-yourself route worked barely a third as often. The moral is almost rude in its simplicity: ambition comes cheaper rented than owned. Treated properly, an innovation budget behaves less like a moonshot and more like a portfolio, a fistful of small bets pruned without sentiment. The most successful AI rollout at most companies is the one nobody approved. Only 40 % of firms pay for an official AI subscription, yet 90 % of employees are already using their own tools to get through the day.
businesschief. com
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