Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, has warned that the rise of artificial intelligence could spark a recession, as white-collar workers are increasingly displaced by new technologies.
“There will be an implication for white-collar jobs,” Siemiatkowski said during an episode of The Times Tech podcast. “And that usually leads to at least a recession in the short term. Unfortunately, I don’t see how we could avoid that with what’s happening from a technology perspective.”
While many voices in the AI industry and beyond have raised concern over the looming threat to professional jobs, Siemiatkowski’s warning stands out as one of the first from a major tech executive to explicitly link that displacement to the possibility of a recession. His comments are a stark shift from the more optimistic narratives often pushed by tech firms, who prefer to frame AI adoption as a tool for unlocking human potential rather than eliminating it.
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At Klarna, the transformation is already well underway. The company has downsized from about 5,500 employees to 3,000 in just two years, a contraction that Siemiatkowski attributes directly to efficiency gains powered by AI.
Klarna has been one of the most aggressive adopters of artificial intelligence among consumer-facing financial firms. In February 2024, the company announced that its AI assistant, developed using OpenAI technology, was handling tasks previously managed by 700 customer service agents.
By late 2023, Klarna had also imposed a hiring freeze, and Siemiatkowski declared in a Bloomberg interview that AI was already capable of performing “all of the jobs” humans do. But earlier this year, the CEO appeared to backtrack slightly, admitting during a gathering at Klarna’s Stockholm headquarters that the automation push may have gone too far.
“From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want,” he said, suggesting the company would return to modest hiring.
While Siemiatkowski’s remarks have added urgency to the debate, he is not the only high-profile figure warning of AI’s disruptive potential on white-collar labor.
Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI lab Anthropic, has been even more blunt. In a statement earlier this year, Amodei projected that artificial intelligence could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” he said.
Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, also cautioned that entry-level roles — particularly in engineering — are becoming increasingly difficult to justify. According to him, firms are shifting towards experienced hires who can work alongside AI tools rather than compete with them.
“You want people who know how to delegate work to machines and evaluate the output critically,” Krieger said, adding that future job functions may center more on overseeing and refining what AI systems produce.
While labor disruptions caused by technology have historically taken time to ripple through economies, the scale and pace of AI’s advancement — coupled with its focus on office-based, knowledge-heavy roles — introduces new risks that haven’t been fully mapped out. The risks now have gone beyond displacement to contemplate a broader economic fallout, recession, according to Siemiatkowski’s warning.
Many white-collar professions, once considered protected from automation, are now increasingly vulnerable. Analysts, paralegals, marketing specialists, journalists, junior engineers, and customer support agents are among those already seeing job descriptions rewritten or roles made redundant.
Klarna’s case shows how quickly the shift can occur. With fewer staff and higher productivity per employee, companies are becoming leaner — but also potentially triggering a domino effect on consumer spending, household income, and job creation, especially in economies heavily reliant on service-sector employment.
“I don’t want to be one of those CEOs who downplay the consequences of AI,” Siemiatkowski said. “I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to tell what I see so that society can start taking preparations.”
Whether policymakers, businesses, or workers are prepared to deal with the structural transformation that AI is already bringing remains an open question. But if Siemiatkowski is right, the economic implications may arrive sooner and hit harder than many had anticipated.