Klarna used an AI avatar of its CEO to deliver earnings, it said

Sebastian Siemiatkowski is leaning all the way into the idea that his buy-now-pay-later, IPO-bound startup Klarna is an AI company. When Klarna delivered updated quarterly earnings on Monday, it was his AI avatar (pictured above) that presented the highlights, according to the company’s YouTube video.

Other than AI Siemiatkowski’s admission, it wasn’t obvious that this was AI. There were only a few subtle signs: AI Siemiatkowski didn’t blink as much as most humans do. The voice sync was good, but not perfect. The AI was also wearing a brown jacket that looked a lot like the one from a widely circulated corporate photo of his human self (though the shirt was different).

Klarna, which is getting ready to debut as a public company, was using the updated financials to tout AI as a driving factor for hitting 100 million users. It credited its use of AI for a fourth consecutive profitable quarter, explaining that it “streamlined its workforce by ~40%,” the company said in its blog post, driving up revenue per employee to nearly $1 million.

Human Siemiatkowski specified to CNBC that “the company has shrunk from about 5,000 to now almost 3,000 employees.”

He’s not the first CEO to poke fun at the idea of an AI replacing a CEO. AI sales agent startup Artisan, known for its viral “stop hiring humans” ad campaign, posted an April Fool’s video of its CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack being fired and replaced with an AI CEO.

But maybe the idea of AIs replacing CEOs isn’t a total joke. While it’s certainly true that some CEOs — especially at startups — do get their hands dirty coding features or cold-calling prospects, a CEO’s main jobs are to set strategy, make decisions, and take responsibility for those decisions.

Who better than an AI built on a SATA reasoning model to digest large swatches of company data, study gobs of successful business strategy, and use that to make decisions? In fact, research published in Harvard Business Review last year found that an AI could, mostly, outperform human CEOs, based on a model using GPT-4o.

However, the AI CEO also quickly got fired by the study’s virtual board. This is because it did poorly responding to “black swan events, such as market collapses during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers found. Still, as AI advocates like to point out, these are early days. Future AI CEOs may learn to excel at that, too.

Klarna did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.