Leaning In to Automation
Ask typical corporate executives about their goals in adopting artificial intelligence, and they will most likely make vague pronouncements about how the technology will help employees enjoy more satisfying careers, or create as many opportunities as it eliminates. A.I. will “help tackle the kind of tasks most people find repetitive, which frees up employees to take on higher-value work,” Arvind Krishna, the chief executive of IBM, wrote in 2023.
And then there’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the chief executive of Klarna, a Swedish tech firm that helps consumers defer payment on purchases and that has filed paperwork to go public in the United States with an expected valuation north of $15 billion.
Ambitious Plans
Over the past year, Klarna and Mr. Siemiatkowski have repeatedly talked up the amount of work they have automated using generative A.I., which serves up text, images and videos that look like they were created by people. “I am of the opinion that A.I. can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do,” he told Bloomberg News, a view that goes far beyond what most experts claim.
According to Klarna, the company has saved the equivalent of $10 million annually using A.I. for its marketing needs, partly by reducing its reliance on human artists to generate images for advertising. The company said that using A.I. tools had cut back on the time that its in-house lawyers spend generating standard contracts — to about 10 minutes from an hour — and that its communications staff uses the technology to classify press coverage as positive or negative. Klarna has said that the company’s chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and that the bot resolves cases an average of nine minutes faster than humans (under two minutes versus 11).
A Bold Statement
Mr. Siemiatkowski and his team went so far as to rig up an A.I. version of him to announce the company’s third-quarter results last year — to show that even the C.E.O.’s job isn’t safe from automation.
In interviews, Mr. Siemiatkowski has made clear he doesn’t believe the technology will simply free up workers to focus on more interesting tasks. “People say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, there’s going to be new jobs,’” he said on a podcast last summer, before citing the thousands of professional translators whom A.I. is rapidly making superfluous. “I don’t think it’s easy to say to a 55-year-old translator, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to become a YouTube influencer.’”
Saying What Investors Can’t
Mr. Siemiatkowski may have at times overstated what A.I. has accomplished at Klarna, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the future.
Dr. Brynjolfsson of Stanford notes that most office jobs are collections of tasks, and that while A.I. can take on some of them, it still struggles to combine most or all of them in the manner of a human.
A Growing Concern
But even he believes that could change within a few years, while a growing number of tech experts argue that artificial general intelligence — a bot that can do anything the human brain does — is not far-off. Mr. Altman of OpenAI recently predicted that A.I. agents — bots than can perform relatively complicated tasks on their own— would soon “join the work force” and “materially change the output of companies.” Others have predicted that such agents will take over a wide variety of jobs.
Conclusion
Mr. Siemiatkowski has brought clarity to this discussion. In his eagerness to court investors, and in his tendency to overstate the case and say the quiet part out loud, he has laid bare Silicon Valley’s ambition. In his own slightly muddled way, for his own slightly idiosyncratic reasons, he is helping to surface a conversation that has largely been whispered in the executive suites.
FAQs
Q: What are the goals of adopting artificial intelligence in the corporate world?
A: According to executives, A.I. will help employees enjoy more satisfying careers, or create as many opportunities as it eliminates.
Q: What has Klarna automated using generative A.I.?
A: According to Klarna, the company has automated tasks such as generating images for advertising, reducing the time spent generating standard contracts, and classifying press coverage.
Q: Does Mr. Siemiatkowski believe that A.I. will simply free up workers to focus on more interesting tasks?
A: No, Mr. Siemiatkowski believes that A.I. will displace certain jobs, and that it is not easy to say to workers that they will be able to transition to new roles.
Q: What does the future hold for A.I. and job displacement?
A: While A.I. is not yet capable of performing all tasks, many experts believe that it will soon be able to do so, and that this will have significant implications for the workforce.
