Klarna has become one of the clearest examples of how a tech company can talk about generative AI as a workforce strategy while still relying on people for important work. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says the buy now, pay later company essentially stopped hiring about a year ago, but Klarna’s own job listings and public hiring activity show a more complicated picture.
The company has reduced headcount, and Siemiatkowski credits AI with helping make that possible. Yet Klarna is not replacing every departing employee with software. It is still advertising roles, still filling selected positions, and still describing some hiring as essential.
What Klarna's CEO says AI has changed
In a Bloomberg TV interview, Siemiatkowski described a sharp shift in Klarna’s approach to hiring. He said the company had stopped hiring about a year ago and linked the change to generative AI’s ability to take on work previously done by employees.
“We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we’re 3,500,”
He explained the reduction as the result of natural attrition rather than a simple one-time cut. In his description, people leave as they normally would in a tech company, and Klarna is shrinking because it is not replacing them at the same pace.
“We have a natural attrition, as [does] every tech company. People stay about 5 years — so 20% leave every year — and by not hiring, we’re simply shrinking.”
Siemiatkowski’s view of AI is not modest. He also said, “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” and added that some of the efficiency gains would be shared with employees through faster salary increases.
Those comments fit a broader pattern. To start 2024, the Klarna CEO said ChatGPT was doing the work of 700 human employees. At another point, he said Klarna was dropping Salesforce as a CRM provider and replacing it with AI, a claim Marc Benioff expressed skepticism about. This week, Siemiatkowski also made an AI deepfake of himself to report financial results, in an effort to show that even a CEO could be replaced by AI.
The job listings tell a narrower story
Despite the strong message from the CEO, Klarna is not operating as a company with no need for new human workers. The company is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website.
There is also evidence of active hiring inside the company. Klarna managers have said they are actively hiring or growing their teams at least half a dozen times throughout 2024, according to LinkedIn posts viewed by TechCrunch. Recently hired employees have also posted about joining Klarna’s policy, software engineering, and global partnerships teams.
That does not erase the workforce reduction. Klarna has significantly reduced its employee count in the last year. But it does mean the phrase “stopped hiring” needs context. The company appears to have stopped broad expansion hiring while continuing to fill selected jobs.
For readers trying to understand what AI adoption looks like inside a real business, that distinction matters. A company can slow hiring, reduce headcount through attrition, and use AI to increase efficiency while still needing people in critical roles.
Klarna says the message was simplified
Klarna’s global press lead, John Craske, told TechCrunch that Siemiatkowski’s comments were directionally true but simplified for a broadcast interview. His explanation reframes the hiring freeze as a major slowdown rather than a complete stop.
“When you look at it historically, we were hiring between one to one and a half thousand people a year from 2019 to 2022,”
“Now, we’re not actively recruiting to expand the workforce but only backfilling some essential roles, predominantly engineering.”
That statement is important because it separates two different hiring goals. Klarna says it is not actively recruiting to expand the workforce. But it is still backfilling some essential roles. The difference is the difference between growth hiring and replacement hiring.
It also shows where the boundary currently sits. Engineering is still described as a predominant area for essential backfilling. Policy and global partnerships also appear in posts from recently hired Klarna employees. Those examples suggest that even a company promoting aggressive AI use still has functions where human hiring continues.
Why the timing matters
Klarna’s workforce today is described as the same size as it was in 2021. That context changes how the AI story should be read. The company hired heavily during the pandemic, like many tech companies, and later reduced its workforce as others did, including Meta and Amazon.
That does not mean AI is irrelevant to Klarna’s current staffing model. The company says AI is helping it do more work with fewer people. But the headcount comparison to 2021 suggests the shift is also part of a wider tech industry correction after a period of heavy hiring.
There is another layer: Klarna is looking to IPO soon. Siemiatkowski may be trying to show investors that the company is aggressively incorporating generative AI into workflows and that the benefits are already visible. A smaller workforce, slower hiring, and public AI demonstrations all support that message.
Still, the evidence in Klarna’s own hiring activity points to a more grounded conclusion. AI may be reducing the need for some hiring. It may be allowing Klarna to avoid replacing every worker who leaves. But it has not removed the need for people across the company.
What Klarna's example really shows
The Klarna case is not a simple story of AI replacing a workforce outright. It is a story about a company using AI as part of a broader efficiency push, while continuing to hire where it sees essential needs.
The most accurate reading is also the least dramatic: Klarna has shrunk from 4,500 to 3,500 employees, says it stopped expansion hiring about a year ago, and is still backfilling some roles. Its CEO believes AI can do all human jobs, but the company’s own job listings show that the transition is not absolute.
For other businesses watching Klarna, the lesson is practical. AI adoption can change hiring plans before it eliminates jobs entirely. It can make leaders more selective about backfilling. It can also become part of the story a company tells employees, customers, and investors.
But Klarna’s open roles make one point hard to miss: even in a company publicly arguing that AI can replace human work, humans are still being hired.