Klarna CEO reveals plan to reduce workforce by 50% and replace it with AI

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is so bullish on AI that the Swedish buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platform plans to cut it's workforce by 50 percent in the next few years.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Siemiatkowski said that Klarna is hoping to scale its workforce down from 3,800 to 2,000 employees. The current employee count was already reduced from 5,000 after Klarna conducted mass layoffs last year. With almost half the workforce at the company, Siemiatkowski plans to shift customer service and marketing duties to AI. "Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less," he said to the FT.

None of this is coming out of the blue. Siemiatkowski has been vocal about the cost-saving benefits of AI. Klarna implemented a hiring freeze last December, with the end-goal of "shrinking" the company and replacing certain tasks with AI. In an archived post on X that has since been deleted, Siemiatkowski received backlash for boasting about the millions of dollars saved by automating tasks like AI image generation, implementing an AI assistant, and doing more with half the size of its marketing team.

In the short term, Klarna's approach seems to be paying off. As reported in its Tuesday Q2 earnings call, the BNPL company has greatly narrowed its net losses from $84 million to $980,000 when converted from Swedish Krona to US dollars. But betting big on AI automation is a gamble that might not pan out. Economic experts in a Goldman Sachs report see "limited US economic upside from AI," and if history tells us anything, automation of certain services like self-checkout kiosks and customer service can backfire and create new problems.

Klarna isn't the only tech company to cut its workforce in favor of investing in AI. In January Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contractors, and attributed the redundancy of workers to AI. Meta and Google have also laid off employees as they invest deeper in AI.