The founder and CEO of IPO-bound fintech Klarna took to X to as soon as once more clarify why his firm ditched Salesforce’s flagship CRM product a few yr in the past in favor of its personal homegrown AI system.
However this time, Sebastian Siemiatkowski emphasised that he doesn’t suppose others will — or ought to — comply with his lead. “I don’t suppose it’s the finish of Salesforce; is likely to be the other,” he wrote.
The information that Klarna had developed its personal in-house AI system primarily based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and that it dropped its contract for Salesforce CRM went viral in September. This got here after Siemiatkowski spoke about dropping Salesforce throughout an investor name and mentioned how its homegrown ChatGPT-powered customer support bot led to changing 700 full-time contract workers and a financial savings of roughly $40 million yearly.
Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff then expressed skepticism about how, precisely, Klarna is managing its buyer information and assembly its compliance wants. “All of the sudden, @Benioff was requested on stage why Klarna was leaving Salesforce. I used to be tremendously embarrassed,” Siemiatkowski wrote.
So, as information circulates that the corporate may go public subsequent month — which means Klarna’s confidential monetary info needs to be made public quickly — Siemiatkowski is clarifying.
As a fintech in a extremely regulated business, he doesn’t need the general public to suppose that Klarna is importing all of its clients’ information into OpenAI. As an alternative, he mentioned on Monday that the mission concerned taking the info saved within the many SaaS programs Klarna was utilizing — together with Salesforce — and consolidating onto its personal internally developed tech stack.
Whereas Siemiatkowski didn’t element precisely the place Klarna moved all of this information, he did title Swedish firm Neo4j and its graph database as a product Klarna is utilizing.
“So no, we didn’t exchange SaaS with an LLM, and storing CRM information in an LLM would have its limitations. However we developed an inside tech stack, utilizing Neo4j and different issues, to start out bringing information=data collectively,” he wrote.
“We allowed our inside AI to make use of this information, and we realised with the assistance of @cursor_ai we may rapidly deploy new interfaces and interactions with it,” he defined.
That is all the newest iteration of an historic debate relating to enterprise software program: construct it versus purchase it.
Siemiatkowski doesn’t suppose most corporations will decide to construct their very own next-generation AI-centric software program.
However he nonetheless thinks that the SaaS business is heading for main consolidation. “Will all corporations do what Klarna does? I doubt it. Quite the opposite, more likely is that we’ll see fewer SaaS consolidate the market, and they’ll do what we do and supply it to others,” he wrote.
Be aware: This story was up to date to incorporate an outline of the OpenAI customer support bot mission.
