The End of the AI Premium

When Klarna listed in New York in September 2025, it presented itself to the market as an "AI-powered digital bank." Its first earnings call as a public company that November ran under the headline "Record-breaking Q3 as AI-Powered Digital Bank," and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski opened by crediting an AI-driven model working at scale.

Six months later, at the first-quarter call in May 2026, the word AI had vanished. Siemiatkowski and CFO Niclas Neglén spoke for nearly an hour, covering prepared remarks and analyst questions. Throughout the entire call, the company did not use the word "AI" once.

In fact, the only time the subject arose was when an external analyst asked about a payments launch with Google. Despite being handed the opportunity, Siemiatowski responded at length regarding trust, data, and the transaction layer, concluding on payment preferences without ever uttering the word ‘AI’.

If we take Klarna and its underlying technology as a case study for the arc of AI language there's insight in what this silence suggests about the economics of the use of the word AI in public company disclosure.

With Klarna being so open about their AI journey we can examine the precise mechanism by which the term "AI" seemingly transforms from something Klarna used frequently to lift this company's valuation, to something they currently avoid using at all.

This change, which I’m presuming was done purposely, suggests a future for other public CEOs where they must calculate whether mentioning AI will help or harm their share price.

Klarna's use of the word "AI" peaked in 2024. It then fell through a period of public rehiring and walk-backs, returned for the IPO listing in late 2025. It then reached zero once the shares were publicly trading by mid-2026.

If the terminology were a gauge of engineering progress, use of the word AI would have likely moved in a steady upward line as capabilities were added. It would not spike for a public listing and then disappear from use.

One way to read the disappearance is that, for Klarna, the word had stopped being worth anything to say. The value of “AI” to a company can work like the value of a promise. A promise is worth the gap between what you have now and what you say you will become. At an IPO that gap is the whole pitch. Klarna sold the market a future bank, and the word carried that future. Once the shares traded, each quarterly result closed the gap a little more. By May the company was being priced on revenue per employee and loss rates, numbers already on the record. To a valuation resting on those figures the word could add nothing, because the gap it named had already closed.

If that is what happened, it points past Klarna. The word may have been worth something while the claim behind it was still scarce. In 2024, an assistant credited with the work of 700 agents was a rare enough claim to carry a price. By 2026, almost every company has made some version of that claim, and a claim everyone has made distinguishes no one, so it commands no premium. For the large share of companies where AI has become a way of running the back office, which is most of the economy and is what Klarna does, the word may have inflated close to nothing.

This would not be true everywhere. Where AI is the thing being sold, at the labs and the chip makers, the gap between what exists and what is promised is still wide open. For companies where AI has become the way they run day to day the word may now add nothing to the valuation while still carrying the risk of a backlash.

On that reading, Klarna is an early case of a company in that position. The company has entered a phase where a CEO’s silence on AI may be the strongest indicator that it is finally working.