Klarna’s CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions

Date:

Share post:


Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that his company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI for enabling this massive workforce reduction.

However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings — for more humans — and the company’s own statements confirm.

“We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we’re 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “We have a natural attrition, as [does] every tech company. People stay about 5 years — so 20% leave every year — and by not hiring, we’re simply shrinking.”

The company’s CEO also said he believes AI can effectively replace workers. “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” said Siemiatkowski. “We’re gonna give some of the improvements [from] the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases.”

Siemiatkowski often makes this variety of comments. To start 2024, the Klarna CEO said ChatGPT was doing the work of 700 human employees. At another point, he said that Klarna was dropping Salesforce as a CRM provider and replacing it with AI, a comment Marc Benioff expressed skepticism about. Just this week, the Klarna CEO made an AI deepfake of himself to report his financial results, attempting to prove that even a CEO can be replaced by AI.

But in practice, while Klarna has significantly reduced its workforce in the last year, the buy now, pay later company has not completely stopped hiring.

Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website. Furthermore, Klarna’s managers have said they are actively hiring or growing their teams at least half a dozen times throughout 2024, according to posts on LinkedIn viewed by TechCrunch. Klarna also hired several new employees in the last year to fill roles on its policy, software engineering, and global partnerships teams, according to LinkedIn posts from recently hired Klarna employees.

Klarna’s global press lead, John Craske, tells TechCrunch that Siemiatkowski’s comments about hiring are directionally true but says the CEO was “simplifying for brevity in a broadcast interview.”

“When you look at it historically, we were hiring between one to one and a half thousand people a year from 2019 to 2022,” said Craske in an email. “Now, we’re not actively recruiting to expand the workforce but only backfilling some essential roles, predominantly engineering.”

In other words, not every job can be replaced with AI today.

While AI may be helping Klarna do more work with fewer people, it’s worth noting that Klarna has the same number of employees today than it did in 2021. Like most tech companies, Klarna was hiring a lot during the pandemic. Many companies, including Meta and Amazon, have reduced their workforces in the last few years, either by slowing down hiring or having layoffs.

It’s also worth pointing out that Klarna is looking to IPO soon. Siemiatkowski could be trying to convince investors that his company is aggressively incorporating generative AI into its workflows and that the benefits are already showing up.

But for most companies these days, AI adoption and implementation are happening at a much slower rate.



Source link

Lisa Holden
Lisa Holden
Lisa Holden is a news writer for LinkDaddy News. She writes health, sport, tech, and more. Some of her favorite topics include the latest trends in fitness and wellness, the best ways to use technology to improve your life, and the latest developments in medical research.

Recent posts

Related articles

Arlan Hamilton announces changes at Backstage Capital, will step into advisory role

Arlan Hamilton, founder of Backstage Capital, announced Friday that her role at the firm she started in...

Why Marc Andreessen was ‘very scared’ after meeting with the Biden administration about AI

After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with government officials about the future of tech last May, he...

‘Reasoning’ AI models have become a trend, for better or worse

Call it a reasoning renaissance. In the wake of the release of OpenAI’s o1, a so-called reasoning...

X gains a faster Grok model and a new ‘Grok button’

XAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, may be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that’s not...

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever believes superintelligent AI will be ‘unpredictable’

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a range of topics at NeurIPS, the annual AI conference, Friday...

OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to...

AI helps Telegram remove 15 million suspect groups and channels in 2024

Telegram has been under unprecedented pressure to clean up its platform this year, after its founder Pavel...

Kalshi CEO admits enlisting influencers to dis Polymarket in a now-deleted podcast segment

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour confirmed on a podcast interview that his employees asked social media influencers to...