Klarna CEO doubts that other companies will replace Salesforce with AI | TechCrunch

The founder and CEO of IPO-bound fintech Klarna took to X to once again explain why his company ditched Salesforce’s flagship CRM product about a year ago in favor of its own homegrown AI system. 

But this time, Sebastian Siemiatkowski emphasized that he doesn’t think others will — or should — follow his lead. “I don’t think it is the end of Salesforce; might be the opposite,” he wrote.

The news that Klarna had developed its own in-house AI system based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT that allowed it to drop its contract for Salesforce CRM went viral in September. This came after Siemiatkowski spoke about it during an investor day, explaining that the project led to replacing 700 full-time contract employees and a savings of approximately $40 million annually.

Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Benioff then expressed skepticism about how, exactly, Klarna is managing its customer data and meeting its compliance needs. “Suddenly, @Benioff was asked on stage why Klarna was leaving Salesforce. I was tremendously embarrassed,” Siemiatkowski wrote.

So, as news circulates that the company could go public next month — meaning Klarna’s confidential financial information should be made public soon — Siemiatkowski is clarifying. 

As a fintech in a highly regulated industry, he doesn’t want the public to think that Klarna is uploading all of its customers’ data into OpenAI. Instead, he said on Monday that the project involved taking the data stored in the many SaaS systems Klarna was using — including Salesforce — and consolidating onto its own internally developed tech stack. 

While Siemiatkowski didn’t detail exactly where Klarna moved all of this data, he did name Swedish company Neo4j and its graph database as a product Klarna is using. 

“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,” he wrote. 

“We allowed our internal AI to use this knowledge, and we realised with the help of @cursor_ai we could quickly deploy new interfaces and interactions with it,” he explained.

This is all the latest iteration of an ancient debate when it comes to enterprise software: build it vs. buy it.

Siemiatkowski doesn’t think most companies will opt to build their own next generation AI-centric software.

But he still thinks that the SaaS industry is heading for major consolidation. “Will all companies do what Klarna does? I doubt it. On the contrary, much more likely is that we will see fewer SaaS consolidate the market, and they will do what we do and offer it to others,” he wrote.