Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO Da clarna
Without fears or taboos, Klarna assumes that she is aggressively reducing her workforce to artificial intelligence. Does it pay so much?
The end of the pandemic and the “return to normality” was a bitter hangover for many companies and was particularly painful to the one that was the largest start-up in Europe: Clear.
Klarna is a Swedish company that has become famous for its model.
According to, before the pandemic, it was worth $ 45.6 billion. It was the fifth most valued company in the worldjust behind Bytedance (Tiktok’s mother company), Spacex, Shein and Stripe.
But the market situation, increased competition and rise in interest rates, along with some wrong commercial decisions, forced it to reduce its assessment to less than $ 7 billion in the blink of an eye.
There were two rounds of mass discharge…
But not everything was bad (or it was… worse)
This crisis was the starting point for a huge experience About the way workforce could be reduced to artificial intelligence (IA).
The executive and co -founder of the company, Sebastian Siemiatkowskihas been booked in public how this technology has allowed him to save and pass from a workforce from 5,000 to 4,000 employees.
That is: for the company, not everything was bad; For the workers, it was… worse.
It sounds bad, but Siemiatkowski is Air further. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Klarna CEO assumed that, in the coming years, he intends cut half of the workforce and replace it with algorithms.
Fell “like a bomb”
The truth is that most companies are already doing what Klarna is pre-ancestry, but they do it silent to avoid scrutiny and fury of the most claiming.
But Klarna’s direction did the opposite: she had boasted from these strategiesin all the forums in which it participates.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski never tires of repeating the way they implemented this technology and the money they spared. The startup head also states that, thanks to AI, “Since the fall of 2023 they don’t need to hire anyone” – Said, quoted by El Confidential.
Siemiatkowski has given several examples of how AI was put into practice in various parts of the company, from the legal department, communications and marketing.
Savings in this domain ascendas the Marketing Director explained to the Wall Street Journal, 10 million euros.
Another of the things that Klarna most promoted was the creation of a bot in conjunction with OpenAi to take on the tasks of the customer service department. According to the company, it was a success. It reduced waiting times from 11 to 2 minutes and the recorestations decreased by 25%.
This allowed him eliminate 700 employees in a month.
Klarna has also created a new database and internal technological infrastructure to become technologically more independent.
But it pays so much?
Despite everything, the savings associated with the use of the AI described in the presentation They seem, for now, little significant – Note or the conditional.
We go to numbers
Chatbot that replaced hundreds of customer service operators resulted in less than 40 million in savings.
A AI tool that automated a specific engineering process resulted in savings, according to the company, 5 million. This must be added 2.5 million of quarterly savings in marketing suppliers.
If we add all these items, they are about 55 million dollars per year.
But this value can be superior if we consider that Klarna talks about how AI helped her be more efficient in tasks like sales, where she talks about a savings of 203 million Over the past two years, although it does not specify how much of this money corresponds to the implementation of technology.
If we attribute 100% of these savings to AI, we would be talking, at best, $ 155 million for a company that spends almost $ 3 billion a year.
As the confidential concluded, These numbers are small And they suggest that “Siemiatkowski is consciously filling this balloon,” using the “optimistic and benefactor argument” that the AI allows people to focus on other tasks or that will be used above all to fill vague or inexpute jobs.
Distrust remains
The distrust of this narrative of the Swedish company was explained by Marcel van de EastNon -Sector Das Fintech.
According to the expert, The discourse on “efficiency driven by AI” does not correspond to the evolution of the workforce.
“Unlike the typical mass disqualification in the technological sector, where companies cut more than 5% of their workforce at once, Klarna made it constant and gradual over three years“Analyzed Van de Oost, quoted by El Confidential.
“This progressive pattern started months before the launch of chatgpt and continued practically at the same pace after“Now, this challenges Siemiatkowski’s statement that personnel changes have simply been due to the adoption of AI.
