Business
Klarna CEO halved his workforce to make way for AI—now, he’s warning workers that other ‘tech bros’ are sugarcoating just how badly it’s about to impact jobs
From Ford CEO Jim Farley to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, a growing number of CEOs are ringing the alarm bells that artificial intelligence could threaten millions of jobs around the world. But one CEO says too many of his peers are sugarcoating the truth.
“I feel a lot of my tech bros are being slightly not to the point on this topic,” Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg on Thursday.
“I think there is a massive shift coming to knowledge work. And it’s not just in banking, it’s in society at large.”
While some executives have tried to calm fears by saying AI will create new jobs, the 44-year-old buy now, pay later billionaire argues that optimism can be misleading—especially in the near term. He singled out that in Brussels, thousands of people still work as translators, a job he says can already largely be done by AI.
“Society will have to figure out what are we going to do because yes, new jobs will be created, but in the shorter term, that doesn’t help the Brussels translator. He’s not going to become a YouTube influencer tomorrow,” he added.
Klarna’s embrace of AI—and being its ‘guinea pig’
Siemiatkowski has been one of AI’s most aggressive adopters, even telling OpenAI’s Sam Altman in 2023 that he wanted Klarna to be ChatGPT’s “favorite guinea pig.”
By early 2024, Klarna had launched an OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot that the company claimed could do the work equivalent to 700 full-time agents.
But not every experiment went smoothly. Some customers complained about the lack of human support, prompting Klarna to walk back part of its AI-first hiring strategy.
“As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg in May. “Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”
Even with the recalibration, Klarna’s AI push has come with real consequences for workers. The company slowed hiring and reduced its employee base from 7,400 to 3,000, Siemiatkowski said.
The cost cuts and tech investment have paid off financially. In its most recent earnings report, the fintech firm reported 38% year-over-year revenue growth in the U.S. and rising profits. That momentum helped Klarna go public in September, and today its market cap is just over $15 billion.
Fortune reached out to Siemiatkowski for further comment.
An AI-first CEO
Siemiatkowski isn’t just talking about AI—he’s living it. He told Bloomberg that he uses the technology “all the time.”
In May, he appeared on an earnings call as an AI-generated video replica, delivering scripted remarks in his own voice and likeness. Klarna also rolled out a 24/7 “AI CEO Hotline,” which answers customer questions in Siemiatkowski’s conversational style, both in English and Swedish.
Even at home, the 44-year-old CEO admits AI has seeped into his off-hours, leaning into vibe coding in particular to explore Klarna’s code base.
“My wife is complaining because when the kids go to sleep, I’m like, ‘Hey, can I just go and vibe code a bit?’ So she’s not too happy with me,” he said.
“But it’s so intriguing, it’s so fantastic to learn these technologies. People should not be afraid of technology.”
