Swedish buy-now-pay-later company Klarna said on Tuesday (28 May 2024) that using GenAI for marketing campaigns and image creation has saved $10m (Skr105.3m) in annual costs. 

The company said it has cut its sales and marketing spend by 11% in Q1 2024 while increasing the number of campaigns more frequently.

In image production costs alone, Klarna has reportedly saved $6m with the use of GenAI tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Firefly. 

“AI is helping us become leaner, faster and more responsive to what our customers care about, leading to a much, much better experience,” said David Sandström, CMO at Klarna. “And we’re actually driving more marketing activity while saving tens of millions of dollars a year.”

Klarna said it has a close partnership with OpenAI and its employees have built more than 300 GPTs for internal use.

There are more than a dozen AI-driven projects within marketing alone, and more than 100 across the entire organisation, the company said.

Last week Klarna said around 87% of its workforce regularly used GenAI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the company’s own AI assistant. 

“We push everyone to test, test, test and explore,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and Co-Founder at Klarna. “As Klarna continues to discover applications for OpenAI’s tech, there’s the potential to take the business to new heights.”

“We’re aimed at achieving a new level of employee empowerment, enhancing both our team’s performance and the customer experience,” he added. 

A Q1 2024 survey by research and analysis company GlobalData found that 27% of respondents stated that their businesses already had a high adoption rate of AI into their workflows.

The same survey found that around 27% of businesses already reported a high adoption rate of AI in their workflows.