Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s CEO, recently disclosed in an interview with Bloomberg TV that his firm largely halted its recruitment process a year ago. He attributed this massive workforce reduction to the implementation of generative AI technology.

However, despite Siemiatkowski’s enthusiastic endorsement of AI, the firm doesn’t entirely depend on AI to fill vacancies left by departing human employees. This is evident from the numerous job listings for human roles and the statements made by the company itself.

“A year ago, we put a stop to our recruitment activities. Our workforce shrank from 4,500 to 3,500,” Siemiatkowski shared with Bloomberg TV. “Like any tech firm, we experience a natural attrition, where employees usually stay for about 5 years. With a 20% yearly departure rate, we are naturally downsizing by not recruiting new staff.”

Moreover, the Klarna CEO expressed his confidence that AI can effectively substitute human employees. He stated, “I firmly believe that AI already has the capability to perform all tasks that we humans do.” He further added that the efficiency improvements enabled by AI would contribute to an accelerated growth in employee salaries.

Siemiatkowski is known for making such bold statements. In 2024, he claimed that ChatGPT, an AI technology, is capable of performing the tasks of 700 human employees. He also mentioned that Klarna would be replacing Salesforce, a CRM provider, with AI, a statement which was met with skepticism by Marc Benioff. Recently, Siemiatkowski used an AI-generated replica of himself to announce the company’s financial results, trying to demonstrate that even a CEO’s role can be substituted by AI.

In reality, though Klarna has significantly downsized its workforce in the past year, it has not completely ceased recruitment activities.

Presently, Klarna has over 50 job openings worldwide, as seen on the job listings page of its website. Several posts on LinkedIn, viewed by TechCrunch, indicate that Klarna’s managers have stated multiple times throughout 2024 that they are actively recruiting or expanding their teams. Moreover, Klarna has brought on board new employees in the past year to fill positions in its policy, software engineering, and global partnerships teams, as per posts from newly hired Klarna employees on LinkedIn.

Klarna’s global press lead, John Craske, informed TechCrunch that Siemiatkowski’s statements about recruitment are generally accurate, however, he added that the CEO was “summarizing for the sake of brevity in a broadcast interview.”

Craske elaborated in an email, “Looking at our historical hiring trends, we recruited approximately 1,000 to 1,500 individuals annually from 2019 to 2022. Currently, we are not actively seeking to expand our workforce, but rather, we are filling some key positions, primarily in engineering.”

In summary, not all roles can be taken over by AI at this point.

Although AI has enabled Klarna to accomplish more tasks with a smaller team, it’s important to note that Klarna’s workforce size remains the same as it was in 2021. Like numerous other tech firms, Klarna heavily recruited during the pandemic. Several firms, including Meta and Amazon, have downsized their workforces in recent years, either by cutting down on recruitment or by implementing layoffs.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Klarna is planning an IPO in the near future. Siemiatkowski may be trying to persuade potential investors of his firm’s proactive integration of generative AI into its operations and the ensuing benefits.

However, for most companies, the adoption and implementation of AI is happening at a much more gradual pace.