THE BUSINESS CHIEF INTERVIEW The trade press repeated it, and over the following year Klarna’ s headcount fell from about 5,000 to 3,000.“ I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do,” Co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg in February 2025. Twelve weeks later he was hiring human agents back.“ As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organising this, what you end up having is lower quality,” he told the same outlet in May. None of that was a technology failure; the assistant did what it had been built to do, and the company had optimised the machine while leaving the method and the manpower roughly where it found them. Praveen has a name for the thing being measured wrong.
“ It is a 3M model for me,” he explains.“ Tapping onto the machine for intelligence, having an understanding of the method that you need for orchestration then visualising your manpower more from an insights, governance and intervention standpoint.” Most companies, he says, never clear the first M:“ People are looking at the machine part, not so much the method and the manpower.” He holds his own teams to the same test, put just as compactly.“ You cannot be output focused. You have to be outcome focused. Is it really enabling the end user to have a different outcome?” That test produced UST Pulse, the company’ s retail platform, which started from the APQC capability references, broke retail into its value streams and then borrowed from an adjacent industry.
businesschief. com 63