Klarna, the Swedish giant of the Fintech known for its purchasing-night purchasing services, has radically reduced its workforce by almost 40%-an emotion of the company’s attributes to a combination of integration of artificial intelligence and natural attrition.
Klarna CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, speaking on CNBC power lunch on Wednesday, revealed that the company’s workforce has gone from around 5,000 to almost 3,000 in the past two years. “The truth is that the company has gone from around 5,000 to nearly 3,000 employees,” he said. “If you go to LinkedIn and look at the jobs, you will see how we shrink.”
The company had 5,527 full -time employees at the end of 2022. In December 2023, this number fell to 3,422, according to Klarna’s IPO tabled in March this year. It is now even lower, nearly 3,000. Klarna maintains that this reduction in the workforce was not driven by layoffs alone, but a deliberate decision to stop hiring, allowing natural attrition – estimated from 15% to 20% per year – to clarify the ranks.
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AI quietly takes the back office
While Klarna continues to frame the cuts as part of a broader efficiency strategy, she was frank on her adoption of artificial intelligence. The company’s partnership with OPENAI in 2023 culminated with the launch of a customer service assistant powered by AI capable of managing the workload of 700 agents. To demonstrate her confidence in automation, Klarna even used a version generated by the AI of Siemiatkowski to present her third quarter results in 2023.
These movements are not just stunts. Klarna’s internal strategy is based strongly on AI for customer interaction and internal operations, part of a trend that sweeps away large technological companies looking for productivity savings by automating roles used by thousands of workers.
However, the CEO admitted that this strategy was not without compromise. In a separate interview with Bloomberg last week, Siemiatkowski recognized that an excessive dependence at AI had led to a drop in the quality of services. He suggested that Klarna would soon rehabilitate human customer service agents as part of a new working model – which he described as “Uber type configuration”, suggesting a part -time or concert jobs rather than traditional full -time roles.
Despite the announcement of a job frost in 2023, Klarna has always been seen by displaying job lists, a contradiction reported by Techcrunch. Since this week, the company actively has hired 10 roles, mainly in Europe.
AI layoffs spread to technology
What Klarna does is far from unique. At the start of this week, Microsoft would have dismissed around 6,000 workers. Although the company has not published official ventilation, the initiates claim that an important part of these cuts was software engineers – roles now being more and more replaced by IA tools like Github Copilot and AI internal coding assistants.
According to several reports, layoffs are involved in the middle of the aggressive expansion of IA infrastructure by Microsoft, in particular following its investment of several billion dollars in Openai. Analysts believe that Microsoft’s push to integrate AI throughout its office suite, Azure Cloud services and software development platforms already produced significant efficiency gains, at the cost of human coders.
This decision highlights a broader reorganization of priorities in the technological sector. Companies no longer use AI to help workers – they deploy it to replace them. A 2024 MCKINSEY & Company report has planned that up to 30% of tasks in software development, customer service and administrative support could be fully automated by 2030, and many companies seem to act on this forecast much earlier.
IPO delays in the midst of market disorders
Klarna’s narrowing workforce comes just when it is preparing for a public offer expected for a long time. The company deposited its IPO prospectus in March and was to register earlier this year. But the market took a safe hit in early April when President Donald Trump, seeking to reaffirm commercial domination in his current administration, announced new rates to target the main American trade partners. The surprise announcement rocked the global financial markets and prompted Klarna, as well as other companies such as the Stubhub ticket market and the ETORO trading platform, to delay their IPOs.
Now, with a little calm returning to the stock markets, the IPOs begin to fall back on the calendar. Etoro became public this week with his stock after a price above his expected range. The company Fintech Chime Financial filed its items in the IPO Tuesday, and the digital health company Hinge Health is expected to list next week.
Klarna, however, has remained silent on a updated calendar, leaving the speculating market observers to find out if it will take place before the end of the year or wait for stronger signals of investors.
The future with fewer humans, more machines
The transformation of Klarna – marked by a workforce into narrowing, increased dependence on AI and experimental work models – can well serve as a plan for what the future of work in the technology industry looks like. But this also raises difficult questions on the rhythm of the adoption of AI and the fate of qualified jobs which once formed the backbone of modern technological companies.
Customer service agents, coders and administrative workers seem to be the first wave of employment roles most vulnerable to AI automation. Klarna’s recognition that the support of AI-Unique has limits suggests that the human touch is always precious, but perhaps only when offered on demand and long-term costs such as pensions, health care or employment safety.
