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 couple of 12 months 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 — observe his lead. “I don’t suppose it’s the finish of Salesforce; is likely to be the alternative,” he wrote.
The information that Klarna had developed its personal in-house AI system based mostly on OpenAI’s ChatGPT that allowed it to drop its contract for Salesforce CRM went viral in September. This got here after Siemiatkowski spoke about it throughout an investor day, explaining that the project led to replacing 700 full-time contract workers and a financial savings of roughly $40 million yearly.
Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Benioff then expressed skepticism about how, precisely, Klarna is managing its buyer information and assembly its compliance wants. “Out of the blue, @Benioff was requested on stage why Klarna was leaving Salesforce. I used to be tremendously embarrassed,” Siemiatkowski wrote.
So, as information circulates that the company could go public next month — which means Klarna’s confidential monetary info needs to be made public quickly — Siemiatkowski is clarifying.
As a fintech in a extremely regulated trade, he doesn’t need the general public to suppose that Klarna is importing all of its clients’ information into OpenAI. As an alternative, he stated on Monday that the challenge concerned taking the info saved within the many SaaS techniques 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=information collectively,” he wrote.
“We allowed our inside AI to make use of this information, and we realised with the assistance of @cursor_ai we might shortly deploy new interfaces and interactions with it,” he defined.
That is all the newest iteration of an historical debate relating to enterprise software program: construct it vs. purchase it.
Siemiatkowski doesn’t suppose most corporations will decide to construct their very own subsequent era AI-centric software program.
However he nonetheless thinks that the SaaS trade 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’re going to do what we do and supply it to others,” he wrote.