Klarna CEO warns AI may cause a recession as the technology comes for white-collar jobs
Speaking on The Times Tech podcast, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there would be "an implication for white-collar jobs," which he said "usually leads to at least a recession in the short term."
"Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid that, with what's happening from a technology perspective," he continued.
Siemiatkowski, who has long been candid about his belief that AI will come for human jobs, added that AI had played a key role in "efficiency gains" at Klarna and that the firm's workforce had shrunk from about 5,500 to 3,000 people in the last two years as a result.
It's not the first time the exec and Klarna have made headlines along these lines.
In February 2024, Klarna boasted that its OpenAI-powered AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. The company, most famous for its "buy now, pay later" service, was one of the first firms to partner with Sam Altman's company.
Later that year, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV that he believed AI was already capable of doing "all of the jobs" that humans do and that Klarna had enacted a hiring freeze since 2023 as it looked to slim down and focus on adopting the technology.
However, Siemiatkowski has since dialed back his all-in stance on AI, telling an audience at the firm's Stockholm headquarters in May that his AI-driven customer service cost-cutting efforts had gone too far and that Klarna was planning to now recruit, according to Bloomberg.
"From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want," he said.
In the interview with The Times, Siemiatkowski said he felt that many people in the tech industry, particularly CEOs, tended to "downplay the consequences of AI on jobs, white-collar jobs in particular."
"I don't want to be one of them," he said. "I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to tell what I see so that society can start taking preparations."
Some of the top leaders in AI, however, have been ringing the alarm lately, too.
Anthropic's leadership has been particularly outspoken about the threat AI poses to the human labor market.
The company's CEO, Dario Amodei, recently said that AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei said. "I don't think this is on people's radar."
Similarly, his colleague, Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, said he is hesitant to hire entry-level software engineers over more experienced ones who can also leverage AI tools.
The silver lining is that AI also brings the promise of better and more fulfilling work, Krieger said.
Humans, he said, should focus on "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale — and that's probably some combination of maybe a comeback of some static analysis or maybe AI-driven analysis tools of what was actually produced."
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