Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said this recently BloombergTV that his company had essentially stopped hiring a yr ago, blaming generative AI for this massive workforce reduction.
But despite Siemiatkowski's bullish stance on AI, the corporate isn't relying solely on AI to interchange retiring human staff, as open job postings – for more people – and the corporate's own statements attest.
“We stopped hiring latest employees a few yr ago. “We were 4,500, now we’re 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “As with any technology company, we experience natural fluctuation. People stay for about five years – so 20% leave yearly – and by not hiring we’re simply shrinking.”
The company's CEO also said he believes AI can effectively replace staff. “I imagine that AI can already take over all of the tasks that we humans do,” said Siemiatkowski. “We will achieve a number of the efficiencies achieved by AI by increasing the speed at which our employees’ salaries increase.”
Siemiatkowski often makes this number of comments. At the start of 2024, the Klarna CEO said ChatGPT was there do the work of 700 human employees. Elsewhere, he said that Klarna would abandon Salesforce as a CRM provider and replace it with AI, a comment that Marc Benioff was skeptical of. Just this week the Klarna CEO made an AI deepfake of itself to report its financial resultsto prove that even a CEO will be replaced by AI.
But in practice, while Klarna has significantly reduced its workforce over the past yr, the buy now, pay later company has not stopped hiring employees entirely.
According to Klarna, greater than 50 positions are currently filled worldwide the job postings page on its website. Furthermore, Klarna managers have confirmed this actively set or expand their teams at the very least half a dozen times in 2024, based on posts on LinkedIn viewed by TechCrunch. Klarna has also hired several latest employees over the past yr to fill roles inside Klarna policy, Software engineeringAnd global partnerships Teams, based on LinkedIn posts from recent Klarna hires.
John Craske, Klarna's global press officer, tells TechCrunch that Siemiatkowski's comments on hiring are groundbreaking, but says the CEO “simplified for brevity in a broadcast interview.”
“Historically, we hired between one and one and a half thousand people per yr from 2019 to 2022,” Craske said in an email. “Now we are usually not actively hiring to expand the workforce, but are only filling some key positions, primarily in engineering.”
In other words: Not every job will be replaced by AI today.
While AI may help Klarna get more work done with fewer people, it's price noting that Klarna has done this the identical variety of employees today as in 2021. Like most tech firms, Klarna hired a number of employees in the course of the pandemic. Many firms, including Meta and Amazon, have reduced their workforces lately, either through slower hiring or layoffs.
It can be price noting that Klarna is aiming for an IPO soon. Siemiatkowski might be attempting to persuade investors that his company is aggressively integrating generative AI into its workflows and that the advantages are already showing.
However, for many firms today, the adoption and implementation of AI is occurring far more slowly.
