Among the top concerns as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced is whether the technology has the power to take over jobs. One CEO firmly believes AI not only has the power to do menial or repetitive tasks, but also has the intelligence and reasoning to take over his own job as chief executive of a multibillion-dollar company.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of buy-now, pay-later platform Klarna, said AI’s reasoning capabilities make that possible.
“To me AI is capable of doing all our jobs, my own included,” Siemiatkowski said in a post on X earlier this year. “Because our work is simply reasoning combined with knowledge/experience. And the most critical breakthrough, reasoning, is behind us.”
While Siemiatkowski said AI is capable of performing his duties as CEO, he’s “not super excited” about the prospect of his job becoming obsolete.
“My work to me is a super important part of who I am, and realizing it might become unnecessary is gloomy,” Siemiatkowski said in the X post. “But I also believe we need to be honest with what we think will happen. And I [would] rather learn and explore than pretend it does not exist.”
Klarna declined Fortune’s request for further comment.
A 2023 survey by online education company edX affirms some CEOs believe AI could take over their jobs. Nearly half of CEOs who responded said they believe “most” or “all” of their job should be completely automated or replaced by AI.
Siemiatkowski is so confident in AI’s capabilities his company stopped hiring more than a year ago. Now AI is doing the work of hundreds of staff across the company. The Stockholm-based company’s headcount fell 22% to 3,500 during the past year, mostly because of attrition, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg last December. The BNPL company as of earlier this year had about 200 people using AI to do their core work, he told Bloomberg. Klarna is currently valued around $14 billion.
Siemiatkowski said, however, some Klarna employees are “rallying” to deploy as much AI as they can—mostly to make some extra money in their paychecks.
“We’re going to give some of the improvements that the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increase,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg.
Can AI really take over C-suite positions?
Siemiatkowski says AI’s vast knowledge base, combined with reasoning capabilities, means the technology can make decisions for a company.
Honu, a tech firm building a decision infrastructure on which AI agents run, argues the same. Imad Riachi, founder and CEO of Honu, told Fortune AI is becoming so sophisticated so quickly its complex reasoning is on pace to become faster than the human brain. This means AI will soon be able to evaluate corporate performance, analyze millions of real-world scenarios, determine business direction, and execute strategy in a fraction of the time it takes for humans to do the same, he said.
“This is a time of awakening for CEOs, their board, and top-level management for existing businesses and future corporate founders,” said Riachi, a former Meta and Goldman Sachs executive. “The unprecedented scope of AI’s decision-making powers demands executives to hold a deeper understanding of its capabilities.”
Other AI leaders aren’t as concerned quite yet about the technology’s capabilities to take over executive-level jobs.
“The idea of AI performing every human job, including that of a CEO, still remains more speculative than realistic at this point,” said Akash Nigam, CEO of AI avatar company Genies, which received $250 million in funding from Disney CEO Bob Iger.
While AI has made “incredible strides” in analyzing data, competing work tasks, and creating content, the “CEO’s role requires not just strategic thinking but probably more importantly, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and nuanced leadership—qualities that AI cannot fully replicate yet,” Nigam told Fortune.
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on January 6, 2025.
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