Source: ZeroHedge.com
Last March, when the world was just learning about the AI crazy that would send markets to bubbly, nosebleed levels, we quoted a report by Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius who used data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, to find that “roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation” as up to “two thirds of occupations could be partially automated by AI.”
Translation: one-third of a billion layoffs (at least) in the US and Europe, or as we put it, “Think of it as the robotization of the service sector.”
Well, it may not be 300 million – yet – but the first 1,200 job losses to take place exclusively thanks to artificial intelligence are now in the books, as a result of mass layoffs taking place at Swedish fintech giant Klarna which has already fired well over 1,000 of its workers and plans to axe almost half of its 5,000 workers thanks to AI, as the lossmaking Swedish buy now, pay later company gears up for a stock market flotation.
As the FT reported, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski heralded the benefits of AI in Klarna’s second-quarter results on Tuesday, which showed a significant narrowing of its net loss from SKr854mn ($84mn) a year earlier to SKr10mn.
The Swedish fintech has already cut its workforce from 5,000 to 3,800 in the past year, and Siemiatkowski said that Klarna could employ as few as 2,000 employees in the coming years as it uses AI in tasks such as customer service and marketing.
“Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less. Internally, we speak directionally about 2,000 [employees]. We don’t want to put a specific deadline on that,” he added.
Separately, Klarna has imposed a hiring freeze on workers apart from engineers and is using natural attrition rather than lay-offs to shrink its workforce….