Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has set the record straight after announcing that Klarna had “shut down Salesforce” as one of its SaaS providers last September.
In a post on X, Siemiatowksi revealed he was “tremendously embarrassed” by the whole situation and felt his initial comments were widely misinterpreted. He took some time to break down what really happened with Salesforce and Klarna.
What Did Klarna Actually Do?
It was initially believed that Klarna shut down all of its SaaS providers in an attempt to fully utilize AI – more specifically, ChatGPT – and organize company data more efficiently. However, this is apparently not the case.
The buy-now-pay-later specialist discovered that much of their company knowledge – employee data, performance metrics, company goals, etc. – was all spread across too many different SaaS tools. Essential enterprise features such as auditing, versioning, and access control were also identified as fragmented.
In order to eliminate the silos of information, Klarna began to consolidate its systems, leading to the “shutdown” of Salesforce.
“The side consequence of this was the liquidation of SaaS. Not all of them, but a lot of them,” Siemiatkowski explained. “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 (a Swedish graph database company) to start bringing data = knowledge together.”
Despite not using their CRM offerings, Salesforce still maintains a relationship with Klarna, as the companies continue using Slack for workplace communication.
SaaS’s Future in an AI World
This decision kickstarted a larger conversation about the future of CRMs like Salesforce; can large-scale SaaS be replaced by AI?
Some experts argue that AI agents could render traditional SaaS interfaces obsolete by automating tasks and interacting directly with backend systems. In this scenario, AI agents would handle tasks such as data entry, analysis, and reporting without the need for human-operated interfaces.
However, we recently spoke to Avanthika Ramesh, Director of Product Management at Salesforce AI, who emphasized that while AI agents are certainly playing a role, SaaS is far from being replaced and is in fact aiding SaaS services more than anything.
“Based on certain record updates or processes or information, the agent is able to fulfill a whole workflow without having the human waste time doing that because it’s very repetitive and manual,” Avanthika said. “We’re already seeing a lot of that, and I would say SaaS is not dead.”
Siemiatkowski clearly explained that he felt this bold approach was more of a necessity given the situation he was in with his company data. However, he doesn’t think that most companies will opt into the same approach of AI-centric software.
Instead, he believes that the SaaS industry could shrink, meaning fewer but more powerful SaaS platforms may dominate the market.
Large SaaS companies (including Salesforce) will likely adopt Klarna’s strategy of consolidating data and workflows, but instead of companies building their own systems, these SaaS providers will offer it as a service to others.
“Will all companies do what Klarna does? I doubt it,” he wrote. “[It’s] much more likely that we will see fewer SaaS [companies] consolidate the market, and they will do whatever we do and offer it to others.”
Final Thoughts
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made his skepticism of this decision very clear. In response, it seems as though Siemiatkowski is calling on Salesforce to change their SaaS strategy.
As Salesforce goes “all-in” on their Agentforce offerings, it’s likely that we’ll see their SaaS/AI relationship blossom over the coming months – especially off the back of this comment.
