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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many tech investors are already banking on this outcome, effectively counting on automation to save their huge bets on free-spending A.I. companies. In an influential analysis last year, the venture capitalist David Cahn estimated that the combined A.I.-related revenue of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft was likely to be hundreds of billions a year less than the amount needed to pay back investors.
One way to make the numbers add up is if employers can save hundreds of billions of dollars using A.I. to replace workers in the relatively near future. In that case, the revenue of companies like OpenAI could grow rapidly and their investors could earn a profit. But one way to make the numbers add up is if employers can save hundreds of billions of dollars using A.I. to replace workers in the relatively near future.
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. Even he believes that A.I. had allowed his company to largely stop hiring as of September 2023, which reduced its overall head count to under 4,000 from about 5,000. He said he expected Klarna’s workforce to eventually fall to about 2,000 as a result of its A.I. adoption.
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