There had been lots of speculation that AI was going to disrupt human jobs, but there are now ground reports trickling in from the real world.
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has said that the company had stopped hiring humans a year ago because AI was taking over their jobs. Klarna is a Swedish fintech company that provides online financial services and is worth nearly $15 billion. It says that because of using AI, it is able to maintain productivity while reducing its workforce by 20 percent every year through attrition.
“I’m of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” Siemiatkowski said in an interview. “It’s just a question of how we apply it and use it. We stopped hiring about a year ago. So we were 4,500 (employees). Now we’re 3, 500 (employees). We have a natural attrition as with every tech company. So people stay about five years. So 20 percent leave every year,” he added.
Siemiatkowski said that having fewer employees would have an upside for the remaining employees — they would see some pay raises. “And by not hiring, we’re simply shrinking, right? What we’ve said to our employees though, is what’s going to happen is the total salary cost of Klana is going to shrink, but part of the gain of that is going to be seen in your paychecks. So 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 increases,” Siemiatkowski added.
Klarna’s CEO said that the company’s employees were looking to use as much AI as possible in their jobs so that their salaries could increase. “People internally at Klarna are just rallying to deploy as much efficiency AI as they can, because it just means it has direct implications on their equity, and their cash compensation for working at Klarna,” he added.
This isn’t the first time that Klarna has publicly spoken about its aggressive AI deployments. In March this year, Klarna had said that it had deployed an AI assistant that was doing the work of 700 employees. The company’s customer support AI was answering customer queries faster and more efficiently than human workers — Klarna discovered that query answer times fell from 11 minutes to 2 minutes with the AI bots, and it led to a 25 percent decrease in repeat enquiries.
Now Klarna isn’t a small setup where it’s able to easily deploy AI and get results. Klarna has 85 million customers and 5.75 lakh merchants on its platform. It does more than 2.5 million transactions a day. And if a company at this scale has stopped hiring humans entirely, and is able to maintain its productivity while seeing its workforce fall by 20 percent every year, it should raise alarm bells for the future of white-collar jobs everywhere.