• Klarna's CMO built an AI version of himself for team members to vent at during a tough period.
• David Sandström said it helped keep real-life meetings on track and forward-focused.
• Sandström described how Klarna is leaning into AI and why he wants to hire "marketing engineers."

When Klarna CMO David Sandström had to navigate his organization through a rough period of budget cuts, he didn't hold a town hall to smooth the internal friction. He created an AI version of himself to take the heat instead.

Speaking on a recent webinar hosted by the AI company ElevenLabs, Sandström described his digital replica as an internal "venting machine."

He said he told his team, "I believe that people are probably quite pissed with me, and I would like to give them a way of expressing that without having to send me angry Slack messages."

The AI version of Sandström was programmed to always be friendly, ask for forgiveness, and take the blame, he said.

"I just didn't want to hear the whining in the meetings anymore. So I said, call this number, get it out of the system. When we then meet, we focus on the future," Sandström said.

The AI-Sandström inspired Klarna to build a chatbot version of the company's CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, that customers can call to share feedback. It's trained on his many podcast appearances.

"That was, to some extent, a PR stunt but also a gold mine of feedback and ideas from customers," Sandström said.

Klarna isn't the only high-profile tech organization experimenting with AI avatars. LinkedIn cofounder and veteran Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman created a "deepfake twin" trained on decades-worth of his content and designed to act and sound like him. The AI Foundation has also created digital clones of figures such as Deepak Chopra and Richard Branson.

Swedish fintech Klarna was an early pioneer in using AI to root out inefficiencies in areas like marketing and customer service, and to take on some of the work previously done by human employees. Siemiatkowski touched a nerve in 2024 when he said AI let his in-house marketing team do more at "half the size."

It hasn't all been smooth sailing, though. The following year, the fintech company redeployed workers to customer support roles after acknowledging that its earlier cost-cutting in that department had gone too far.

Sandström said there are still areas where AI fails, and human intervention is required.

For example, Sandström said the company built a Meta account that creates content based on what it knows about Klarna's products and can autonomously spend its own budget. When using a template designed to make content that could go viral, the creative engine can sometimes go "incident-level crazy," Sandström said.

Advertisers told Business Insider last year that Meta's generative AI tools had sometimes gone rogue, conjuring up bizarre ads even after they had switched off some AI-related settings. Meta said at the time that it offered advertisers the opportunity to review AI-generated ads and that it was continuously improving its products.

Seeking 'marketing engineers'

Sandström's marketing department, which he calls a "marketing factory," is all-in on AI.

It's worked with Databricks to move all of its data out of scattered silos, such as Salesforce and Google Sheets, into a centralized location where non-engineers can query it. Elsewhere, it's experimenting with AI-generated synthetic audiences to test how different consumer segments might react to an ad campaign or to changes in its user experience.

Klarna grew its revenue by 38% to $1 billion in the quarter that ended December 2025. Klarna's stock is trading down around 50% year to date, however. The company posted a net loss in the fourth quarter, as it continued to expand beyond its "buy now, pay later" roots into more traditional lending products that carry higher expenses and credit risks.

During the webinar, Sandström said he now looks to hire "marketing engineers" — people who understand marketing but also the tech that powers it. The balance of skills he looks for still favors people with traditional marketing backgrounds.

Sandström said it's easier to train marketers in the "small amount of engineering needed" than to teach an engineer the "touch, taste, and tactile" skills needed for marketing.

Sandström said he's not in the camp that believes AI will wipe out junior-level jobs. He's more worried about the "middle-aged generalist."

"I'm very interested to find the people with the right traits and mindset rather than the right experience," Sandström said.

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