The CEO of the Swedish Payment Company Klarna said that the rise of artificial intelligence could lead to a recession while technology replaces jobs in white collar.
Speaking on the Podcast Times Tech, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said that there would be “an involvement for white collar jobs”, which, according to him, “generally led to at least one short -term recession”.
“Unfortunately, I do not see how we could avoid this, with what is happening from the point of view of technology,” he continued.
Siemiatkowski, who has long been frank on his conviction that the AI will come for human jobs, added that AI had played a key role in “efficiency gains” in Klarna and that the company’s workforce had gone from around 5,500 to 3000 people in the past two years.
This is not the first time that the executive and Klarna have made the headlines in this direction.
In February 2024, Klarna boasted that her assistant propelled by Openai was doing the work of 700 full -time customer service agents. The company, the most famous for its service “Buy Now, Pay later”, was one of the first companies to associate with the Sam Altman company.
Later that year, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV that he believed that AI was already capable of making “all jobs” that humans are doing and that Klarna had promulgated a job freeze since 2023 when he was considering thin and focusing on the adoption of technology.
However, Siemiatkowski has since resumed its all-in position on the AI, saying to an audience at the headquarters of the company’s Stockholm in May that its efforts to reduce Customer Service cost focused on AI had gone too far and that Klarna was planning to recruit now, according to Bloomberg.
“From the brand’s point of view, a company’s point of view, I just think that it is so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you wish,” he said.
In the interview with Times, Siemiatkowski said he thought that many people in the technological industry, in particular CEOs, tended to “minimize the consequences of AI on jobs, jobs in white colors in particular”.
“I don’t want to be one of them,” he said. “I want to be honest, I want to be fair and I mean what I see so that society can start to take preparations.”
However, some of the best AI leaders have also sounded the alarm.
The leadership of anthropic was particularly frank on the threat that AI poses for the human labor market.
The CEO of the company, Dario Amodei, recently said that AI could eliminate 50% of jobs with entry -level collar in the next five years. “We, as producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest on what will happen,” said Amodei. “I don’t think it’s on people’s radar.”
Likewise, his colleague, Mike Krieger, Director of Products at Anthropic, said that he was hesitant to hire entry -level software engineers compared to more experienced software engineers who can also take advantage of AI tools.
The silver lining is that AI also brings the promise of a better and more fulfilling work, said Krieger.
Humans, he said, should focus on “proposing the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, finding how to properly delegate the work, then finding it to review things on a large scale-and it is probably a combination perhaps a return of a static analysis or perhaps analysis tools focused on AI of what has been really produced.”
