After promising AI could replace its people and quietly hiring them back, Klarna is now making an even bigger, riskier bet: becoming a bank. Last spring, I was building a case for AI-driven process automation at work when a colleague forwarded me a headline about Klarna quietly rehiring the customer service staff it had replaced with a chatbot a year before. I sat with that irony for a while, the poster child for AI transformation walking back its own headline number. I hadn't thought about Klarna much since. Then last week, checking out at an online store, the app nudged me toward some new banking feature I hadn't noticed before. A few days later, Klarna's stock jumped again, this time on rumors of an Apple deal . Same company, another bold headline. The pattern. Klarna has a habit of turning its own transformation into headline material. In February 2024, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski announced that an AI assistant built with OpenAI was doing the work of 700 cust...