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 perhaps the other,” 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 venture led to changing 700 full-time contract staff 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 knowledge 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 firm might go public subsequent month — that means Klarna’s confidential monetary data 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 prospects’ knowledge into OpenAI. As a substitute, he stated on Monday that the venture concerned taking the information 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 knowledge, 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 knowledge in an LLM would have its limitations. However we developed an inner tech stack, utilizing Neo4j and different issues, to begin bringing knowledge=information collectively,” he wrote.
“We allowed our inner AI to make use of this information, and we realised with the assistance of @cursor_ai we might rapidly deploy new interfaces and interactions with it,” he defined.
That is all the most recent iteration of an historic debate in relation to enterprise software program: construct it versus purchase it.
Siemiatkowski doesn’t suppose most firms 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 firms do what Klarna does? I doubt it. Quite the opposite, more likely is that we are going to see fewer SaaS consolidate the market, and they’ll do what we do and provide it to others,” he wrote.
