Why Is This C.E.O. Bragging About Replacing Humans With A.I.?

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.And then there’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the chief executive of Klarna, a Swedish tech firm that helps consumers defer payment on purchases and that has filed paperwork to go public in the United States with an expected valuation north of $15 billion.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.According to 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.Klarna has said that the company’s chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and that the bot resolves cases an average of nine minutes faster than humans (under two minutes versus 11).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.We are having trouble...