Klarna Group CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said his company was able to stop hiring a year ago thanks to its investments in artificial intelligence that does the work of hundreds of the company’s employees.
The buy now, pay later financing provider saw its workforce drop 22% to 3,500 during that period, mainly due to attrition, Siemiatkowski said in an interview on Bloomberg Television in New York on Thursday. The company now has about 200 people using AI for their primary jobs, he said.
Siemiatkowski said that even though total payroll was shrinking, he was able to convince employees to participate in this change by promising them that they would see a share of the productivity gains they received from AI in their pay.
“People internally at Klarna are mobilizing to deploy as much effective AI as possible,” he said. “We will deliver some of the efficiency improvements that AI brings by increasing the rate of salary increases for our employees.”
Klarna said earlier this year that its AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. In its latest results, the company used an AI-generated version of Siemiatkowski to present the results, which the CEO said it did to prove that AI could eventually replace all jobs.
Investors are closely watching the results of Klarna, which confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO last month. The company cut costs and nearly broke even in the first nine months of the year.
Analysts have estimated the company’s value to be around $14.6 billion in recent weeks. That’s an improvement over the $6.7 billion price tag it raised in its last fundraising round in 2022, but it’s still a far cry from the $45.6 billion it raised. received in 2021 at the height of the fintech boom.
Klarna, which has 85 million customers worldwide, is expanding rapidly in the United States and would eventually like to become a bank in the country, the same way it operates in Europe, Siemiatkowski said. He said the company would accept new President Donald Trump’s offer to invest $1 billion in the United States in exchange for an expedited licensing process.
“Klarna is a bank in Europe, we want to become a bank in the United States,” he said. “We want to expedite our applications for money transfer licenses. We are more than happy to take on Trump and make this billion-dollar commitment to the U.S. market a reality.”