The debut of DeepSeek on the international stage has sent Silicon Valley scrambling. Markets haven’t remained untouched, either, with tech stocks stumbling and investors asking if AI companies really need as much money as they claim.
Panic aside, the rise of DeepSeek also means that a powerful open source model is basically within reach of anyone, from individuals and small businesses to large companies. That prompts another question: What will this mean for human jobs?
While the general talking point in Silicon Valley is that AI will help humans do their jobs better and faster, one tech CEO says that AI will one day be fully capable of doing human jobs. In fact, he says it already can.
The Klarna case. Sebastian Siemiatkowski is the CEO of Klarna, a Swedish buy-now-pay-later company that has become ubiquitous in U.S. online shopping portals in recent years. It was one of the companies that benefitted from the lockdowns during the covid-19 pandemic, a time when many people stuck at home were splurging on shopping.
Like many companies that saw a rise during pandemic times, Klarna also experienced the fall. In 2021, it was valued at $45.6 billion. One year later, Klarna was valued at $6.7 billion. That was the year that Siemiatkowski discovered ChatGPT.
AI at Klarna. Siemiatkowski was blown away by what ChatGPT was able to do when it launched in November 2022 and reportedly quickly arranged a meeting with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. As told by The New York Times, he proceeded to encourage Klarna employees to test ChatGPT out at work. By 2024, the Klarna CEO and the company were frequently touting the benefits of AI in news releases and interviews.
One of the use cases he pointed to involved using Klarna’s OpenAI assistant to resolve customer service enquiries by itself.
“This is a breakthrough in practical application of AI!” Siemiatkowski said on X in 2024. “It performs the equivalent job of 700 full time agents…”
A freeze in hiring. Siemiatkowski later revealed that the use of AI at Klarna had enabled the company to stop hiring new employees altogether. When it comes to AI, Siemiatkowski said that using AI tools for marketing had saved the business $10 million annually and had also cut down on in-house lawyer time.

Doing more with less. But Siemiatkowski doesn’t just want to use AI to stop hiring new people, he also one day wants to use it to replace his employees. In an interview with the Financial Times, he pointed out that the company was becoming smaller, reducing its headcount from 5,000 to 3,800 in one year.
The Klarna CEO added that the headcount reduction was due to attrition, not layoffs. Eventually, the company could have as few as 2,000 workers.
“Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less. Internally, we speak directionally about 2,000 [employees]. We don’t want to put a specific deadline on that,” Siemiatkowski said.
While some may worry about the loss of jobs, in Siemiatkowski’s view, the use of AI to replace workers is good for Klarna employees in the long-run. Furthermore, he claims that if AI generates more unemployment, that’s an issue for governments to worry about.
“If I can get to a superior revenue per employee that will allow us to pay top class for the best talent, the people who are currently deep-diving and learning AI,” he said. "The very strong message to our employees is: less total labor cost, higher cost per individual. I’m very happy about seeing that this is paying off.”
“Their favorite guinea pig.” If anything can be said about Siemiatkowski, it’s that he’s AI’s biggest cheerleader, at least in public. During an appearance on The Logan Bartelett Show, Siemiatkowski was asked whether it was true that he had told OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that he wanted to be their guinea pig. Not exactly, Siemiatkowski answered.
“Their favorite guinea pig,” the CEO clarified.
Anyone can be replaced. While many executives claim that AI will free up their employees to focus on more important work, Siemiatkowski appears to believe that AI has the potential to do anyone’s job, even his own. He sent an AI-generated version of himself to deliver Klarna’s third quarter results in 2023.
“People say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, there’s going to be new jobs,’” he said. “I don’t think it’s easy to say to a 55-year-old translator, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to become a YouTube influencer.’”
True believer or master strategist? All in all, Siemiatkowski has established himself as Silicon Valley’s poster child for AI in the workplace—at least in public. However, some question whether he actually believes in the technology or whether he’s just using it to generate interest in Klarna. The company’s IPO is one of the most anticipated of 2025.
“The benefits of AI are likely to be a key selling point for any Klarna IPO,” the Financial Times wrote in 2024.
The answer will likely be found in Klarna’s future.
Images | TechCrunch
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