Last month, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski boasted that he hadn't hired anyone in a year as a result of his company embracing AI.
Klarna's workforce had shrunk by about 22 percent since doubling down roughly a year ago. Meanwhile, the company has amassed a valuation of well over $14 billion, in what Siemiatkowski frames as a financially successful bid to cash in on the hype surrounding AI.
The fintech company, which offers "buy now, pay later" services for the e-commerce industry, made a big fuss about its OpenAI ChatGPT integration, gushing that its AI assistant could do the work of "700 full-time agents" in a February press release.
But that kind of purportedly superhuman productivity could have dire consequences for the job security of practically anybody at the company — including its CEO, as it turns out.
That's something experts have long warned could be a possibility in the age of AI automation. In simple terms, it's not just low-level grunt work that's on the chopping block: high-level executives could equally be made redundant by genuinely clever AI.
"To me AI is capable of doing all our jobs, my own included," Siemiatkowski wrote in a lengthy tweet on Sunday.
"Because our work is simply reasoning combined with knowledge/experience," he argued. "And the most critical breakthrough, reasoning, is behind us."
But being out of a job because of your own commitment to AI is something that Siemiatkowski is "not super excited" about.
"My work to me is a super important part of who I am, and realizing it might become unnecessary is gloomy," he wrote. "But I also believe we need to be honest with what we think will happen. And I [would] rather learn and explore than pretend it does not exist."
Researchers have already studied the possibility of CEOs becoming an endangered species in the age of AI.
"My first instinct is they would say, 'Replace all the employees but not me,'" former director of MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab Anant Agarwal told The New York Times last year. "But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a CEO does can be replaced by AI."
Beyond a gleeful sense of justice felt by low-level employees everywhere, ditching CEOs could also free up considerable funds. The average CEO makes around $16 million, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) — and that's without getting into the incompetence of many top-level executives.