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Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently said Bloomberg TV His company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI with enabling this massive workforce reduction.
However, despite Siemiatkowski’s optimism about AI, the company is not fully relying on AI to replace human workers who are leaving, as job listings that are open — to more humans — and the company’s own data confirm.
“We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we are 3,500,” Siemiatkovsky told Bloomberg TV. “We have natural attrition, as with every technology company. People stay for about 5 years – so 20% of them leave every year.” “By not hiring, we are simply shrinking.”
The company’s CEO also said he believes AI can effectively replace workers. “I am of the opinion that artificial intelligence can actually do all the jobs that we humans do,” Siemiatkovsky said. “We will deliver some of the efficiency improvements that AI provides by increasing the pace of salary increases for our employees.”
Siemiatkowski often provides this variety of commentary. To start 2024, Klarna CEO said ChatGPT was Carrying out the work of 700 human employees. At another point, he said Klarna was ditching Salesforce as a CRM provider and replacing it with artificial intelligence, a comment about which Marc Benioff expressed doubts. Just this week, Klarna CEO He created a deep fake of himself using artificial intelligence to report his financial resultsin an attempt to prove that even a CEO can be replaced by artificial intelligence.
But in practice, while Klarna has significantly reduced its workforce in the past year, the buy now, pay later company has not completely stopped hiring.
Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 positions worldwide, according to Job advertisements page on its website. Moreover, Klarna managers said they were Actively hiring or Grow their teams At least six times throughout 2024, according to posts on LinkedIn seen by TechCrunch. Klarna has also hired several new employees in the past year to fill roles at the company policy, Software engineeringand Global partnerships The difference, according to LinkedIn posts from recently hired Klarna employees.
John Kraske, head of global press for Klarna, tells TechCrunch that Simiatkowski’s comments about hiring are directionally correct, but says the CEO was “simplifying the brief in a radio interview.”
“When you look at it historically, we were hiring between a thousand and a thousand and a half people a year from 2019 to 2022,” Crasky said in an email. “Right now, we’re not actively hiring to expand the workforce, but just backfilling some core roles, mostly engineering.”
In other words, not every job can be replaced by AI today.
While AI may help Klarna get more work done with fewer people, it’s worth noting that Klarna has Same number of employees today than in 2021. Like most tech companies, Klarna has been hiring a lot during the pandemic. Many companies, including Meta and Amazon, have reduced their workforces in the past few years, either by slowing hiring or laying off workers.
It’s also worth noting that Klarna is looking to go public soon. Siemiatkovsky may be trying to convince investors that his company is aggressively integrating generative AI into its workflow and that the benefits are already starting to show.
But for most companies these days, AI adoption and implementation is happening at a much slower rate.
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