CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

Yahoo

18 hours ago

'Sorry if I'm being blunt,' says Sebastian Siemiatkowski as he explains why he delegated Klarna's last financial results announcement to an AI-generated version of himself. But 'I have yet to meet a CEO that's excited about the quarterly earnings reports and calls with investors.'
The Swedish payments company's co-founder and CEO doesn't fear his avatar replacing him any time soon, but says even executives may yet find themselves in the robots' path, as 'it is definitely easier to replace the CEO than it is to replace a nurse.' Bluntness comes easily to Siemiatkowski, particularly when he's explaining how artificial intelligence threatens employment in his own business and beyond.
Siemiatkowski is a pioneer of the $560 billion 'buy-now-pay-later' industry. He now stands on the cusp of a New York listing that could value his creation at a reported $15 billion and validate his 20 years of proselytizing for its business model. He has also become a standard-bearer for the notion of 'AI-first' companies, after saying last year that the technology could replace 700 customer service agents.
Klarna reduced staffing by 39% over two years to cut losses Siemiatkowski blames in part on his own overhiring. It is still shrinking by 10 to 15 people a week through natural attrition, he says, adding that he uses LinkedIn to track his fellow CEOs' headcount as a 'bullsh*t detector' of how serious they are about automating work.
AI's disruptions to workforces could cause a recession, Siemiatkowski posited this week, but he thinks companies are not leveling with employees about that prospect. Some Silicon Valley CEOs reassure audiences that new jobs will replace the ones being lost, he says: 'And then I talk to them in private rooms and it's like, 'Oh my God, the jobs are gone'... I feel that is dishonest.'
Several 'AI-first' executives have faced pushback, with Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn having to reassure users that the language-learning app would still hire humans after a social media backlash. Siemiatkowski, too, has tempered his plans and is rehiring some flesh-and-blood customer service agents.
'Obviously, AI today can pretend to be empathetic and express emotions and stuff, but at the core, people crave human connection,' he says, predicting that offering a real person at the end of the line will become 'a VIP thing' for which customers pay a premium.
Transparent, not top-down
The risk of branding your company 'AI-first' is that staff hear 'employees second.' Siemiatkowski says Klarna has used savings from shrinking its payroll to increase compensation for the 3,422 employees it has retained. But he thinks managers are too often afraid to tell their people how much change they see coming.
'We think we're protecting them,' he says. 'But over time, you realize that it generally leads to bad outcomes and lack of trust. I've learned that it's better to be honest and transparent, and trust my employees to be grown-ups who can deal with complex, threatening information.'
Siemiatkowski is a fan of Toyota's ethos of enlisting employees to improve processes, and Klarna has been gathering 200 staff at a time on video calls to ask where technology could eliminate inefficiencies. Managers are not imposing recommendations from on high, he says. 'The team members saw it themselves.'
The process can leave dozens of employees out of a role at a time, he says, but normal churn means the company usually has other positions to fill. Klarna puts sidelined staff 'on the bench' to be able to fill jobs as people resign, he says, adding that 80% of them find a new position within days.
The hands-on path to growth
It's a misconception that executives can't scale up a company by being hands-on, Siemiatkowski says, pointing to in-the-details executives from Walmart's Sam Walton to Apple's Steve Jobs. 'The truth is that hands-on is the only thing that truly scales.'
He has regulators and credit committees to worry about, he notes, 'but I can't let that eat the whole agenda. I need to have two or three days a week where I can go deeper in specific areas and accept that, maybe for a few months, this is where I'm going to spend more of my time.'
That was the approach Siemiatkowski took early in the pandemic, when Klarna realized that it was at risk of ceding the US market to Afterpay, an Australian competitor. Unable to travel, he and his team began furiously tapping their networks — anyone from investors and employees to LinkedIn contacts — to arrange virtual meetings with US retailers. It soon concluded that 'nothing beats the CEO sales pitch.'
Siemiatkowski made 1,000 sales calls to US retail executives in 2020. 'I would go to the office in the morning, do my job in Swedish [working hours], come back, eat dinner with the kids, and then log in,' he recalls. By the end of that year, Klarna had deals with roughly half of the country's 100 largest chains. It took until this year for him to secure an exclusive deal with Walmart, after giving it warrants over Klarna shares. The world's largest retailer is a great negotiator, he says, so 'any deal you make with them is going to be a tough deal.'
A disrupter meets its skeptics
From the start, Siemiatkowski was driven by an urge to disrupt the finance industry's incumbents. 'I dreamt, since I was a kid, about going after the banks,' he says. The debt collectors' letters he recalls his parents receiving fueled his 'crazy obsession,' he says.
Regardless of personal grudges, he also saw that 'banks digitally sucked' 20 years ago, creating lucrative opportunities for new entrants. 'We weren't like, 'Oh, we're going to start this corporate social responsibility bank,'' he says: 'It was: 'We're going to make a lot of profit.''
Two decades later, Klarna has just reported a fourth consecutive quarter of profitability, albeit on an adjusted basis. But Siemiatkowski still routinely has to reassure commentators and authorities that Klarna's 'pay in four' model is not leading consumers to spend money they don't have.
He blames some of that on the lobbying and messaging power of the industry he set out to disrupt. Klarna's core product generates lower profit margins than credit cards, he notes, 'so this model is threatening a very, very large profit pool of incumbents.' Klarna has yet to find a report on its industry that it thinks is entirely unbiased, he says.
Last month, the Federal Reserve reported that late payments by BNPL borrowers had increased sharply in 2024. While the Trump administration has said it will not regulate industry members like credit card lenders, Democrats and UK regulators want more oversight. When Klarna struck a partnership deal with food delivery group DoorDash in March, journalists seized on the notion of consumers paying for pizzas in installments as evidence of BNPL lenders tempting customers to overextend in a fragile economy.
'It lends itself to amazing headlines and a lot of clicks,' Siemiatkowski says, but 'it has nothing to do with reality.' Klarna's average BNPL user has outstanding debt of under $100 and can think for themself, he says. He is not arguing for no regulation, he insists, saying: 'I love capitalism — as long as democracy puts some limits to its most shameless actions.'
A country cousin crosses the Atlantic
Klarna is a rare European startup to crack the US, and Siemiatkowski jokes that he feels like 'the cousin from the countryside' in Silicon Valley, even with venture capitalist Michael Moritz chairing his board. 'When I go to San Francisco, I always feel like I'm — 'Hello, I'm from Sweden!'' he says in an exaggerated accent.
Building a global business from Stockholm has been hard, he says. 'We grew very successfully, but in a very small market, so the success in Sweden could never support the success in Germany. And the success in Germany could never support the success in the UK. And the UK couldn't support the US.'
He sees Europe's higher tax rates on the kind of people who make enough money from one startup to invest in others as holding back future Klarnas. Entrepreneurs need early-stage backers, he notes. 'Who are these angel investors? Well, they are rich people. Where do you get rich people? Well, people who don't get taxed too much.'
Sweden's prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has been among those urging Europe to make its capital markets more competitive with New York. But Siemiatkowski seems unswayed. The US is Klarna's largest market, he says, and more than half of its investors are there. 'How are we Swedish?' he asks bluntly. 'Because I happen to live here?'
A New York initial public offering would put Klarna head-to-head with Affirm, the payments rival led by PayPal alumnus Max Levchin. Affirm's stock has been on a wild ride this year, halving between mid-February and early April, then staging a strong enough rally to rise above January's level, in bouts of market volatility that have deterred many companies from listing.
Siemiatkowski says he and Moritz decided early on that Klarna would have to be well-known — and profitable — in the US for it to list there. It met those conditions in 2023, he says: 'Now it's just a question of when you feel the market conditions are right.'
Klarna has already weathered extreme swings in the private markets, with its valuation spiking as high as $46.5 billion before coming down to earth to $6.7 billion after a funding round. 'I've been very gifted to get a very rocky ride,' Siemiatkowski says, reasoning that he has learned from failure and is now enjoying applying those lessons.
On one particularly frustrating day, he remembers jumping in his car, cranking up the volume to , by Queen and David Bowie, and realizing that he had chosen this challenge.
'If you're Zlatan [Ibrahimović], the biggest Swedish soccer player, you want to play in the Champions League finals,' he remarks. You may not win the finals, but you have to appreciate the experience regardless of the pressure, he says. 'I mean, this is what I signed up for, right?'