The introduction of AI at firms could lead to a recession due to mass job losses of professionals, Klarna’s chief executive has warned.
The use of AI to make work more efficient has been encouraged by leading figures, including the government itself which said it could save civil servants two weeks a year.
But fintech boss Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who runs the Stockholm-based ‘buy now, pay later’ business Klarna, has warned that its potential to replace work done by office staff could push economies into a recession in the coming years.
Siemiatkowski suggested that tech bosses had tended to dismiss the impacts AI could have on headcounts at firms, with Klarna cutting staff numbers from 5,500 to 3,000 in recent years.
“Many people in the tech industry, especially CEOs, tend to downplay the consequences of AI on jobs and white-collar jobs in particular. And I don’t want to be one of them,” Siemiatkowski told The Times Tech Podcast.
“There will be an implication for white-collar jobs and when that happens that usually leads to a recession at least in the short-term. Unfortunately, I don’t see how we could avoid that, with what’s happening from a technology perspective.”
He said he based his predictions on anecdotes seen through the number of firms pushing AI tools, with economic data not yet considering the impacts of AI.
“I feel like I have an email almost every day from some CEO of a tech or a large company that says we also see opportunities to become more efficient and we would like to compare notes. If I just take all of those emails and add up the amount of jobs in those emails, it’s considerable.”
AI to boost value of ‘human touch’
He said humans could be protected for some jobs at Klarna, such as in customer service where people can work on fraud and other complex banking issues.
“The value of that human touch will increase,” he said, adding that AI meant people working in client-facing roles would have to be more skilled.
“They will provide a much higher quality type of service.”
Siemiatkowski’s comments echo those made by the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, who said half of all entry level professional jobs could be eliminated in the next five years.
The head of another AI firm, Arthur Mesch, who runs French firm Mistral, has claimed that the excitement of fellow tech bosses for its ability to overpower humans was a “very religious” fascination while Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind said it would take another five to ten years before AI would overtake human intelligence.
