Klarna CEO reveals plan to reduce workforce by 50% and replace it with AI [Video]

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is so bullish on AI that the Swedish buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platform plans to cut it’s workforce by 50 percent in the next few years.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Siemiatkowski said that Klarna is hoping to scale its workforce down from 3,800 to 2,000 employees. The current employee count was already reduced from 5,000 after Klarna conducted mass layoffs last year. With almost half the workforce at the company, Siemiatkowski plans to shift customer service and marketing duties to AI. “Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less,” he said to the FT.

None of this is coming out of the blue. Siemiatkowski has been vocal about the cost-saving benefits of AI. Klarna implemented a hiring freeze last December, with the end-goal of “shrinking” the company and replacing certain tasks with AI. In an archived poston X that has since been …