Sebastian Siemiatkowski has fully embraced the concept of his soon-to-be-public startup, Klarna, as an AI-driven "Buy Now, Pay Later" company. When Klarna released its latest quarterly earnings report on Monday, it was his AI avatar (pictured above) that presented the highlights. This was showcased in a video on the company's YouTube channel.
Apart from AI Siemiatkowski’s self-introduction, it’s hard to tell this isn’t real. There are only subtle hints: AI Siemiatkowski doesn't blink as frequently as most people. The voice syncing is good but not flawless. The AI also wears a brown jacket strikingly similar to the one seen in a widely-circulated company photo of the real Siemiatkowski (though the shirt is different).
Klarna is preparing for its debut as a public company, leveraging updated financial data to promote AI as a key factor behind reaching 100 million users. In its blog post, the company explained that utilizing AI helped it achieve profitability for the fourth consecutive quarter and stated that it had "streamlined approximately 40% of its workforce," driving revenue per employee close to $1 million.
The real Siemiatkowski told CNBC that the company reduced its headcount from around 5,000 employees to nearly 3,000 today.
He isn’t the first CEO to joke about AI replacing a CEO. Artisan, an AI sales agent startup known for its viral "Stop Hiring Humans" ad campaign, released an April Fool’s Day video where its CEO, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, got fired and replaced by an AI CEO.
But perhaps the idea of an AI CEO isn’t entirely a joke. While some CEOs—especially in startups—may personally write functional code or reach out directly to potential clients, the main role of a CEO is to formulate strategies, make decisions, and take responsibility for those decisions.
Who better than an AI, built on SATA inference models, to digest vast amounts of corporate data, analyze countless successful business strategies, and use them to make informed decisions? In fact, research published last year in the Harvard Business Review found that AI can outperform human CEOs in most scenarios, based on models using GPT-4o.
However, the AI CEO was quickly dismissed by the virtual board of directors involved in the study. This was due to poor performance during "black swan events, such as market crashes during the COVID-19 pandemic," the researchers discovered. Still, as AI advocates like to point out, this is just the early stage; future AI CEOs might learn to excel in these areas as well.
