Klarna’s CEO Says Hiring Hiring Thanks to AI But Still Posting Many Open Positions

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said recently Bloomberg TV his company stopped hiring a year ago, crediting generative artificial intelligence for enabling this massive workforce reduction.

However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company isn’t fully relying on AI to replace departing human workers, as open job listings — mostly for humans — and the company’s own statements confirm.

“We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we have reached 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “Like any tech company, we have natural attrition. People stay for about 5 years – so 20% leave every year – and by not hiring we’re just shrinking.”

The company’s CEO also said he believes AI can effectively replace workers. “I think artificial intelligence can already do all the things that we humans do,” Siemiatkowski said. “We’re going to give some of the efficiency improvements that AI provides by increasing the rate at which our workers’ wages increase.”

Siemiatkowski often makes such comments. To start 2024, Klarna CEO said ChatGPT 700 people do the work of the worker. At another point, he said Klarna is dropping Salesforce as a CRM provider and replacing it with AI. Marc Benioff expressed his doubts. Just this week Klarna CEO deeply faked itself with artificial intelligence to report financial resultseven trying to prove that the CEO can be replaced by artificial intelligence.

But in practice, while Klarna has significantly reduced its workforce over the past year, the buy-now-pay-later company hasn’t completely stopped hiring.

Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 positions worldwide job postings page on their website. Furthermore, Klarna’s managers said they were active recruitment or they grow their teams At least half as much in 2024, according to LinkedIn posts reviewed by TechCrunch. Klarna also hired several new employees last year to fill his role politics, software engineeringand global partnerships teams, according to LinkedIn posts by recently hired Klarna employees.

John Craske, Klarna’s global head of press, told TechCrunch that Siemiatkowski’s comments about the hiring were true, but that the CEO was “simplifying for brevity in a broadcast interview.”

“Historically, when you look at it, we’ve been hiring between one and a half thousand people a year from 2019 to 2022,” Craske said in an email. “Right now, we’re not actively recruiting to expand our workforce, but we’re filling some important roles, mostly engineering.”

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

While AI can help Klarna do more with fewer people, Klarna’s There are the same number of workers today than in 2021. Like most tech companies, Klarna has been hiring heavily during the pandemic. Many companies, including Meta and Amazon, have reduced their workforces in the past few years, either by slowing hiring or cutting back.

This is also worth mentioning Klarna is preparing for an IPO soon. Siemiatkowski may be trying to convince investors that his company is aggressively incorporating generative AI into its business processes and that the benefits are already showing.

But for most companies these days AI adoption and implementation is happening at a slower pace.