How much money can #Artificial Intelligence save a business? That’s a hugely important question for businesses nowadays—uncertainty about the answer is holding up wider adoption of various new AI products, as we described on several fronts this week. And on this point, a securities filing by the installment lender Klarna today for its planned initial public offering doesn’t exactly make the best case for AI as a cost saver. More than almost any other company, Klarna executives have talked loudly about how using AI has saved it money. But the savings outlined in its IPO filing seem pitifully small. For instance, the filing said that an AI assistant that did the equivalent work of more than 800 full time human staffers “delivered $39 million of cost savings in 2024.” AI helped Klarna save $2.6 million on marketing suppliers in the first quarter of last year. “AI-powered marketing” saved another $2.5 million in the first quarter of 2024. An AI tool that automated a critical and time consuming task on the engineering side saved $4.8 million last year. None of those figures seem like much for a company whose total expenses last year were $2.9 billion. To be fair, Klarna claimed AI helped in many other areas, contributing to a $203 million reduction in sales and marketing costs over the past two years, although the company didn’t specify how much of that was due to the new AI technology and how much from other steps it said it took. Klarna has reduced its employee number by 38% since 2022, partly because of its reliance on AI. So we can assume that AI proved its benefit in many ways that may be hard to quantify. (Klarna says 96% of its employees used generative AI in their daily work). Still, advocates for AI’s benefits for businesses may wish Klarna could have cited more impressive numbers in today’s filing. https://www.appeconomyins..