Perhaps the only thing worse than having a boss who thinks your job can be replaced by artificial intelligence is having a boss who thinks he can do your job for you with AI and wants to show you his work. Unfortunately, depending on your role at the company, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is guilty of both.
Futurism recently highlighted the CEO’s unfortunate insistence on vibe coding prototype features with AI and then making his actual, professional engineers review his work and try to implement it.
Siemiatkowski recently appeared on the podcast Sourcery, where he revealed his new hobby of cosplaying as an engineer, using AI tools to write code and then bringing those ideas to the desks of the people he pays to do that job. On the episode, the CEO admits he’s never coded before, but he started using the AI-powered code editor Cursor to craft prototypes for new features, which he said takes him about 20 minutes to whip up before he takes them to his engineering team.
“Rather than disturbing my poor engineers and product people with what is half good ideas and half bad ideas, now I test it myself. I come say, ‘Look, I’ve actually made this work, this is how it works, what do you think, could we do it this way?’” he said.
To Siemiatkowski’s credit, he has at least a smidgen of self-awareness about the situation. He joked that he occasionally falls for the AI’s sycophancy that tells him all of his ideas are great, and he admitted that playing with code in Cursor has made him think about projects in a new way and forces him to articulate his ideas more clearly when communicating with his team. But does that prevent his engineers from letting out a deep sigh when they see Siemiatkowski coming, ready to make them look at a feature he doesn’t actually understand but claims works? Hard to say.
Last year, Siemiatkowski said in an interview with the Financial Times that Klarna might employ as few as 2,000 employees in the years ahead as it utilizes AI support in areas like customer service and marketing. According to the company’s most recent SEC filing, the company had 3,098 full-time employees as of December 2024, down from 5,527 in December of 2022, attributed to a strategic decision to “reduce our overall headcount and drive operational efficiency by leveraging AI in our business.” Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported the company was planning to launch a recruitment drive to bring on more support to help ensure customers can always talk to a human.
A spokesperson for Klarna said the company’s AI customer service had no impact on headcount as the company’s customer service is handled by outsourced providers, and described the company’s initiative to hire back humans as “over-stated.” While the company is running a pilot program to bring humans into the customer service process, it has hired two people so far, according to the spokesperson.
There might be a similar effect from his interest in code, seeing as the vibe-coding epidemic has been creating opportunities for humans even as others are replaced. NBC and 404 Media both recently ran stories about the new economy of workers and freelancers brought on to correct the messes made by AI-generated code. A survey by cloud computing company Fastly found that 95% of surveyed developers spend extra time fixing AI-generated code, with some saying it takes more time to fix errors than they save by initially generating the code with AI tools. Research firm METR also recently reported finding that using AI tools actually makes developers slower to complete tasks.
But the CEO feels smarter, and isn’t that what really matters?
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Klarna reduced its headcount to 2,000 and hired back human staff for customer support. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski previously indicated the possibility of reducing headcount to 2,000, but has not done so. As to hiring back human staff, the company announced a pilot program for customer support to work remotely and has hired two human customer-service agents as part of the program. We regret the error.