Klarna’s CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that his company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI for enabling this massive workforce reduction.

However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings — for more humans — and the company’s own statements confirm.

“We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we’re 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “We have a natural attrition, as [does] every tech company. People stay about 5 years — so 20% leave every year — and by not hiring, we’re simply shrinking.”

The company’s CEO also said he believes AI can effectively replace workers. “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” said Siemiatkowski. “We’re gonna give some of the improvements [from] the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases.”

Siemiatkowski often makes this variety of comments. To start 2024, the Klarna CEO said ChatGPT was doing the work of 700 human employees. At another point, he said that Klarna was dropping Salesforce as a CRM provider and replacing it with AI, a comment Marc Benioff expressed skepticism about. Just this week, the Klarna CEO made an AI deepfake of himself to report his financial results, attempting to prove that even a CEO can be replaced by AI.

But in practice, while Klarna has significantly reduced its workforce in the last year, the buy now, pay later company has not completely stopped hiring.

Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website. Furthermore, Klarna’s managers have said they are actively hiring or growing their teams at least half a dozen times throughout 2024, according to posts on LinkedIn viewed by TechCrunch. Klarna also hired several new employees in the last year to fill roles on its policy, software engineering, and global partnerships teams, according to LinkedIn posts from recently hired Klarna employees.

Klarna’s global press lead, John Craske, tells TechCrunch that Siemiatkowski’s comments about hiring are directionally true but says the CEO was “simplifying for brevity in a broadcast interview.”

“When you look at it historically, we were hiring between one to one and a half thousand people a year from 2019 to 2022,” said Craske in an email. “Now, we’re not actively recruiting to expand the workforce but only backfilling some essential roles, predominantly engineering.”

In other words, not every job can be replaced with AI today.

While AI may be helping Klarna do more work with fewer people, it’s worth noting that Klarna has the same number of employees today than it did in 2021. Like most tech companies, Klarna was hiring a lot during the pandemic. Many companies, including Meta and Amazon, have reduced their workforces in the last few years, either by slowing down hiring or having layoffs.

It’s also worth pointing out that Klarna is looking to IPO soon. Siemiatkowski could be trying to convince investors that his company is aggressively incorporating generative AI into its workflows and that the benefits are already showing up.

But for most companies these days, AI adoption and implementation are happening at a much slower rate.