Swedish Fintech Company Stopped All Hiring Since Last Year Replacing Workers With AI

Klarna Group Chief Executive Officer Sebastian Siemiatkowski said his company was able to stop hiring a year ago as it invested in artificial intelligence that's doing the work of hundreds of staff across the firm.

The buy now, pay later finance provider has seen headcount fall 22% to 3,500 during that time, mostly due to attrition, Siemiatkowski said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York on Thursday. The company now has about 200 people using AI for their core work, he said.

Siemiatkowski said that while the total wage bill is shrinking, he's been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they'll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck.

"People internally at Klarna are just rallying to deploy as much efficiency AI as they can," he said. "We're going to give some of the improvements that the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increase."

Klarna said earlier this year that its AI assistant, which is powered by OpenAI, is doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. During its most recent earnings, the company used an AI-generated version of Siemiatkowski to present the results, which the CEO said he did to prove that AI could ultimately replace all jobs.

Investors have been keeping a close eye on results at Klarna, which confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering last month. The company has been shedding costs and almost broke even in the first nine months of the year.

Analysts have said the firm is worth about $14.6 billion in recent weeks. That's an improvement from the $6.7 billion price tag it garnered in its last fundraising in 2022, but it's still a ways off from the $45.6 billion it received in 2021 during the height of the fintech boom.

Klarna, which has 85 million customers globally, has been rapidly expanding in the US and would like to eventually become a bank in the country, similar to how it operates in Europe, Siemiatkowski said. He said the company would take incoming President Donald Trump's offer to invest $1 billion in America in exchange for a sped-up licensing process.

"Klarna is a bank in Europe, we want to become a bank in the US," he said. "We want to speed up our money-transmitting license applications. We are more than happy to take Trump and do that $1 billion commitment to the US market."