Klarna’s plan to swap workers with AI
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The CEO of Klarna, the by now, pay later service, said the company plans to cut its workforce dramatically by opting not to replace workers when they quit and instead use artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps. We’ll get into it. And, Nvidia’s earnings that beat analysts’ expectations didn’t impress everybody. Plus, we’ll unpack the Justice Department’s new lawsuit against a rent-setting software company, and celebrate a win for the American wheelchair rugby team.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Klarna: AI lets us cut thousands of jobs – but pay more” from BBC News
- “Nvidia reports 122% revenue growth on surging demand for data center chips” from CNBC
- “How one company transformed the apartment rental market” from Axios
- “Chuck Aoki dominates, Sarah Adam makes history as USA Wheelchair Rugby holds off Canada | NBC Sports” from NBC Sports
- “Paralympic wheelchair rugby or ‘murderball’ isn’t for the faint of heart” from The Washington Post
Join us tomorrow for Economics on Tap. The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make |
| 0:10.4 | today makes sense. I'm Kyle Rizdoff. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. It's |
| 0:14.4 | Thursday, today the 29th, holy cow, 29th of August. I know, right? I feel like June and July were such chaos and madness that they didn't feel like anything |
| 0:27.1 | It was just all a blur and then suddenly we're at the end of August |
| 0:30.5 | Oh Wow What a summer. Anyway today we going to listen back to some of the big |
| 0:34.7 | stories of not the summer but just the week. We've got some audio clips lined up. Our first |
| 0:39.0 | clip is from Sebastian Semia Kowski, CEO of the Buy Now Pay Later Company, Klarna. |
| 0:46.0 | At Klarna, what we have said internally very clearly to everyone is that we expect to be fewer in the future. |
| 0:52.0 | And this is through natural attrition in a tech company like |
| 0:54.4 | ours about 20% people leave on an annual basis just to go work elsewhere people stay about five years. |
| 1:00.3 | So we have said to all our employees we're going to be less but as a consequence of that we're going to be able to pay more per employee. |
| 1:05.3 | So it's a positive development for our employees. |
| 1:09.3 | Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. |
| 1:11.2 | I did the whole we're going to pay you. Well no no you go sorry. I'll let you take that one. |
| 1:13.0 | Well, no, no, you go ahead and I'll editorialize at the end because holy cow. |
| 1:17.0 | Come on. |
| 1:18.0 | Okay, so that was Klein of CEO on BBC Radio 4 yesterday talking about how he sees artificial intelligence |
| 1:26.2 | already impacting Klinea's workforce. |
| 1:29.0 | So in the past year, Klarna has already cut its workforce from 5,000 people to 3,800 people and the company wants to reduce that even more to 2,000 employees by not replacing workers who leave. Now many folks who are in |
| 1:46.9 | workforces all across America are very familiar with the idea of people leaving |
| 1:51.2 | those jobs staying open and it meaning more work for you |
| 1:54.4 | those who remain and the plan for Klarna and for many of the companies doing |
... |
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