Affirm (AFRM) plans to leverage artificial intelligence to boost productivity, not cut jobs, CEO Max Levchin tells Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Tech Conference.

Levchin says there are two ways to think about AI: the “techno-optimist” and the “techno-doomist" mindsets, adding that he stands on the optimistic side.

“I think the future of AI, as far as I can see, and that is what we're doing at Affirm, is more productivity,” the CEO says, believing the company doesn’t “need to lose jobs” just because AI can replace its workforce.

Levchin says the financial services company plans to equip its customer service teams with AI agents and its engineers with AI programming assistants. “We use a lot of the AI today in just the running of the enterprise, and we expect to do a lot more than that,” he tells Yahoo Finance.

The CEO says he’s “optimistic, but also pragmatic,” noting that there are “risks associated with AI” that have “less to do with the [large language] models themselves and more to do with what the models are allowed to do in the real world.”

“I'm not diminishing or dismissing the need for controls and model governance and oversight and thoughtful rule-making,” Levchin says. He just wouldn’t opt to “shut it all down.”

Catch more Yahoo Finance coverage and interviews from the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference, including the full interview with Affirm CEO Max Levchin.

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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.