Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to drastically downsize. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking.
The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third.
Siemiatkowski cited both layoffs and the employees leaving the company and not being replaced, and explained that AI’s integration allows for fewer employees.
Klarna’s slimming down comes even as buy now, pay later (BNPL) services are booming. Around 30% of Americans say they have used them, according to a 2025 Bankrate report. And in 2025, according to a PartnerCentric survey, 35% said they planned to use the services even more. The popularity is driven by the fact that Klarna, like other BNPL options, allows shoppers to split purchases into interest-free installments, pay within 30 days, or even opt for longer-term financing options. Likewise, thousands of retailers now accept BNPL.
Still, the success of such businesses no longer seems to equate to the need for more employees, as AI’s impact looms larger—something some leaders have been increasingly warning about.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei wrote of his gravest concerns about AI in a recent essay that included items like loss of autonomy, “misuse for destruction” and “powerful AI” which he writes is “definitely coming.”
Amodei writes: “I think it should be clear that this is a dangerous situation—a report from a competent national security official to a head of state would probably contain words like ‘the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.’ It seems like something the best minds of civilization should be focused on.” The CEO also predicted AI could cut 50 percent of all white-collar entry-level jobs in the next one to five years, doubling down on a stance he’s warned about previously.
Worryingly, Klarna’s CEO doesn’t disagree with Amodei’s stance, acknowledging that he’s “in Dario’s camp” on concerns around AI.
“I want to be honest about the fact that I do think there’s going to be a very big shift,” Siemiatkowski said on the podcast.
Specifically, he echoed the concerns around job loss. “I’m an optimist at heart, but I also want to be a realist around what’s going to happen in the shorter term, and it’s going to be a lot of turmoil in this.”
Regardless, while the CEO seemed to express some major concerns around AI’s rapid advancements, Siemiatkowski has leaned into them heavily. In 2024, he announced that AI could handle a growing number of jobs as the company paused hiring and cut 2,000 employees. But it wasn’t long before customer satisfaction dipped, and the company had to scramble to reassign workers to customer support to handle the fallout.
The CEO later took to X to explain what went wrong, writing that he was “tremendously embarrassed” about the turn of events.
Fast Company reached out to Klarna to inquire on whether the company would scale back its relationship with AI. A representative said Klarna “did not lean too much into AI,” but its “thinking on human customer service” has changed.
The representative continued, “When you automate a large amount of the simpler customer service requests, you are left with the most complex and sensitive cases . . . So we have begun to directly hire a small number of human agents directly employed by Klarna, not at outsourced providers.”