Klarna could halve workforce to around 2,000 by leveraging AI

Klarna today (Tuesday) said that it could halve its workforce to around 2,000 employees by leveraging AI technology. The Swedish tech giant said its AI assistant was now carrying out the work of 700 employees, reducing the time it takes to fix problems from 11 minutes to two minutes.

Reporting its first-half results, Klarna founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the FT that Klarna could reduce its workforce to around 2,000 over the coming years. Klarna has already reduced its workforce from 5,000 to 3,800 over the past 12 months.

Siemiatkowski told the FT:

“Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less. Internally, we speak directionally about 2,000 . We don’t want to put a specific deadline on that.”

The Klarna founder has been vocal about the virtues of AI technology whilst also recognising its implications for society. The tech firm, most famous for its BNPL product, has introduced a hiring freeze across the organisation, except for engineers.

The payment giant Adyen has also recently spoken publicly about its use of Generative AI, in a blog post.

Adyen said:

“For us, like many other industries, we chose to focus our GenAI efforts on our customer support service and operations.

“Alleviating the operational pressure by increasing the efficiency of our support team was a primary objective that would benefit the company and would also make the life of our colleagues happier by making their job more interesting.”

Klarna today posted first-half profits of $64m, compared to a $43m loss the year previous.