Klarna, an online finance company in Sweden, said it has barely hired in over a year because it believes “AI can do everything”.
“AI can do all the work we do. It’s just a matter of how we apply it and use it,” Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg.
Klarna is a payment service that offers consumers a “buy now, pay later” option. According to its website, the company was founded in 2005 and connects with more than 575,000 retailers globally.
In an interview, Siemiatkowski said Klarna stopped hiring last year. “I don’t think it’s necessary to publicize what we’re doing,” he said. “But we stopped hiring more than a year ago. We had 4,500 employees then, and now we have 3,500.”
The reduction in headcount, he said, was not due to layoffs but “natural attrition, like any tech company.” But thanks to AI, the company has barely hired any new employees and cut many other expenses. Some of the money has been used to increase salaries for current employees.
Klarna is still hiring for some positions, but Siemiatkowski says the company isn’t expanding its workforce, but is instead filling “a few essential roles,” mostly in engineering.
According to Business Insider, the move by companies like Klarna comes as AI increasingly impacts employment, causing many people to worry about being “robbed” of their jobs. Previously, experts also said that this year’s massive tech layoffs were partly related to the “AI ghost“.
A 2023 McKinsey & Company report estimated that 12 million Americans will have to change careers or become unemployed by 2030 as AI develops. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted at the World Economic Forum in early 2024 that more than 40% of the global workforce will be affected by AI by 2030.
However, many experts assert that there needs to be transparency about the concept of AI “stealing” jobs. In a dialogue on December 5 in Vietnam, “the godfather of AI” Yoshua Bengio assessed that AI has shown outstanding progress in many fields, but has not completely replaced humans, especially in stages that require strategic thinking and research.
“Complex, social, and human-influenced application areas will still be where humans are primarily responsible. AI will assist in designing technology, but that is completely different from understanding and dealing with the social context in which the technology is applied,” he emphasized.
Statistics on the future of the labor market at the World Economic Forum 2023 show that by 2025, AI is expected to create 12 million new jobs globally. Another study by McKinsey & Company also shows that AI can contribute to creating 20 million to 50 million new jobs worldwide by 2030.
