Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski revealed this week that the company has cut its workforce by nearly 40%, attributing the drop to a combination of artificial intelligence adoption and routine employee turnover.
Klarna CEO has said that AI helped company shrink workforce by 40%
5/21/2025
“The reality is, we’ve gone from around 5,000 employees to just under 3,000,” Siemiatkowski said during an appearance on CNBC’s Power Lunch on Wednesday. “You can see the trend clearly if you check LinkedIn—we’re downsizing.”
The Swedish fintech company has been a vocal advocate of AI integration across its operations, frequently promoting the productivity improvements the technology has delivered. Last year, Klarna even used an AI-generated version of Siemiatkowski to present its Q3 earnings, illustrating how AI could handle tasks traditionally carried out by humans.
In 2023, Klarna partnered with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and later introduced an AI-powered customer service chatbot. By the end of that year, the company said the AI system was handling the equivalent workload of 700 support agents.
According to Klarna’s IPO filing from March, its full-time staff shrank from 5,527 at the end of 2022 to 3,422 by the end of 2023. The company attributed the reduction primarily to AI implementation and efforts to streamline its workforce. Klarna indicated it expects further decreases in headcount going forward.
Still, Siemiatkowski emphasized that the decline wasn’t entirely driven by AI. “We’ve made it clear to employees that we’re downsizing by pausing hiring,” he said. “In a company like ours, normal attrition is between 15 and 20% annually, so we naturally shrink just from people moving on.”
While Klarna stopped bringing in new hires in 2023 and expanded its use of AI, it continued to post job openings even after announcing the hiring freeze, according to TechCrunch. As of now, the company is advertising about 10 positions, most of them based in Europe.
In a separate interview with Bloomberg last week, Siemiatkowski said Klarna is now considering bringing in more human agents to provide customer service in a flexible, gig-style format—similar to Uber’s model. He admitted that relying fully on AI in customer support had come with trade-offs in service quality.
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