Klarna Gets Ahead With AI

It’s happening – AI is gutting the workforce.

Humans won’t have much opportunity getting white collar jobs in the future.

This is highly advantageous for the price of tech stocks, but it is negative for the overall workforce numbers and, of course, society.

At the root of it, tech corporations are here to maximize shareholder returns and not the careers of human workers.

No more does this ring true than at tech company Klarna (KLAR), where they have dived aggressively into the AI race and cut 60% of their workforce.

Its workforce went from a peak of around 7,400 employees in 2021 to roughly 3,000 by mid-2025, and this is just the beginning of it.

They will keep whittling it down to hundreds if not single digits at some point.

This isn’t just corporate downsizing; it’s a deliberate strategy fueled by AI tools like OpenAI-powered chatbots that now handle the equivalent of 700-800 full-time customer service agents, resolving queries in two minutes instead of 11.

The AI’s efficiency gains have boosted revenue per employee by 73% to nearly $1 million.

For Klarna itself, the AI push has been a boon for its bottom line and stock trajectory, transforming it from a valuation casualty of the 2022 tech bust (down 85% to $6.7 billion) into a resilient IPO contender.

AI-driven cost savings, particularly in customer service and marketing (where asset output surged 600% with 12% less spend), propelled 38% year-over-year U.S. revenue growth and a $21 million profit in 2024, flipping years of losses.

For Klarna, employee morale has tanked; surveys show plummeting satisfaction amid fears of obsolescence, raising retention risks for the “engineers only” hiring mandate.

In tech and fintech, data-rich roles are hit hardest: customer service (40% automatable), data analysis, and junior programming face 60-70% adoption rates, per McKinsey.

Productivity surges (up 73% at Klarna) fuel stock rallies, drawing capital to AI darlings like Nvidia (up 150% YTD 2025).

Reskilling booms too—demand for AI ethicists, prompt engineers, and “last-mile” integrators could add $15 trillion to GDP by 2030, per PwC.

In the short-term, I do agree that these “AI-induced layoffs” juice up the share price, but at what long-term cost?

I scoff at thinking that humans deliver zero value anymore.

Remember that AI is backward-looking; therefore, vision is sapped.

What could happen?

They could get left behind, like the BlackBerry smartphone was overcome by Apple’s iPhone.

Management strategy will suffer if they optimize chatbots for a certain business model, and recalibrating that might be impossible.

Stuck with an old business model, paying for certain bots to do an outdated operation means the business goes to zero.

The CEOs are playing with fire if they believe they can replace the soul of the workforce with backward-looking AI chatbots.

They might gut themselves out of a company.

The more I look into it, AI is just a tool that a human can integrate into their workflow.

Companies will be cutting off their nose to spite their face if they believe AI is a one-to-one substitute.

It might work in the short-term, before the whole thing crashes down.

In the short-term, buy tech, but be concerned that management is driving the bus off a cliff.