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Klarna (KLAR): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Klarna | Fortune

Klarna (KLAR): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Andrew Nusca

Microsoft may cut thousands more jobs in a bid to control costs

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Emma Burleigh

Apollo chief economist says there’s ‘zero evidence’ AI is killing jobs—in fact, he says it’s creating them

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After receiving backlash, the CEO of Standard Chartered apologizes for hurt over saying ‘lower value human capital’ will be automated by AI

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Lily Mae Lazarus

The AI boom is pulling Europe’s hottest startups to the U.S.—whether they planned to move or not

/2026/05/18/ai-boom-creandum-lovable-klarna-startups-trump-carl-fritjofsson-europe/

CEO of a $25.9 billion bank had his AI clone lead the company’s earnings call—as Mark Zuckerberg builds his own digital twin

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https://fortune.com/2026/07/01/microsoft-may-cut-thousands-more-jobs-control-costs/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/standard-chartered-ceo-bill-winters-apologizes-calling-some-workers-lower-value-human-capital-ai-push/?itm_source=parsely-api

Irina Ivanova

As Klarna flips from AI-first to hiring people again, a new landmark survey reveals most AI projects fail to deliver

https://fortune.com/2025/05/09/klarna-ai-humans-return-on-investment/?itm_source=parsely-api

Apollo chief economist says there's ‘zero evidence’ AI is killing jobs—in fact, he says it's creating them

https://fortune.com/2026/06/01/apollo-chief-economist-torsten-slok-zero-evidence-ai-killing-jobs-says-its-creating-them/?itm_source=parsely-api

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says his company has cut 4,000 customer service jobs as AI steps in: ‘I need less heads’

https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-billionaire-marc-benioff-ai-agents-jobs-layoffs-customer-service-sales/?itm_source=parsely-api

Jessica Coacci

Gen Z billionaire Alexandr Wang tells 13-year-olds they should be more like Bill Gates, who snuck out of the house to code at night

https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/alexandr-wang-technology-self-starter-gen-z-billionaire-alexandr-wang-tells-13-year-olds-they-should-be-more-like-bill-gates-who-sneaked-out-of-the-house-to-code-at-night-mark-zuckerberg-scale-ai/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/ceo-of-customers-bank-sam-sidhu-ai-clone-lead-earnings-call-mark-zuckerberg-building-digital-twin/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2026/05/18/ai-boom-creandum-lovable-klarna-startups-trump-carl-fritjofsson-europe/?itm_source=parsely-api

Klarna's $17 billion IPO has just turned 40 staffers into overnight millionaires—while Nvidia, Canva, and Palantir workers are seeing similar gains

https://fortune.com/2025/09/11/klarna-ipo-employee-stock-soaring-millionaires-compensation-nvidia-canva-palantir/?itm_source=parsely-api

Google DeepMind CEO says that humans have just over 5 years before AI will outsmart them

https://fortune.com/2025/03/18/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis-agi-outsmart-human-workers-job-replacement-ai/?itm_source=parsely-api

Sebastian Siemiatowski has achieved something few founders ever do: he’s brought a private company to the public market. Now, if you want, you can own a piece of Klarna. But still, to Sebastian, the day he visited Walmart Founder Sam Walton’s grave in Arkansas will always be more exciting than ringing the NYSE bell. On this episode of Term Sheet, Sebastian talks about how being from a Polish immigrant family in Sweden led him to idolize Walmart, Klarna’s bigger than BNPL business model, and how the future financial services will embrace AI and put the customer back in the driver’s seat.

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatowski on the IPO, Loving Walmart, and Embracing AI

Tech

Presenter: Elias Torres, Founder and CEO, Agency

Brainstorm AI 2024: What it Takes to Build A Startup in the AI Era

Conferences

This is, this is my first time speaking here and it's the first time I got makeup done. So I hope you like it. My slides are not working but OK. Who needs slides? There you go one more. There you go. So I guess this slide is here to tell you that I'm an entrepreneur. I have a problem in my head because I can't stop doing this right. This is my fifth time correction to run it. Uh not five exits. But here I am definitely addicted to this. But in reality, my last company Drift, I sold to Vista and I could have retired. But thanks to the open A I people, the team, they build this great, amazing technology that made me rethink everything and come back because what really happened to me at Drift was that as a founder, I always get to interact with customers directly and I'm just passionate about that and I get to work with, with the customers, they text me, they have direct access to me to my everything and I love doing that right? And that's why I think I've had success because I love my customers. But what happens is that as I get, have success and I grow and I have more customers, I don't have the time anymore for them. And so I think this is kind of probably what happens to you. Tell me how many of you are able to dedicate as much time as you want to, all of your customers raise your hand. Can you do that? What we got to be a little bit more ambitious than that? And so what I would say is that I really struggled with that when I, when I sold the company performable to hubspot, I um I had all these like about 100 customers, about a million in revenue 2009, 2011. And then Hubspot had 5000. And I remember just like when they would call me, I would say sorry, but I have 5, 5000 other customers. I have to build what they need. And so that kind of broke my heart and, and that same thing happened at Drift, right? And so what I'm doing now, right? It really um thinking how I can solve this problem. How can I help all of you take care of your customers? Like if they're the only one anybody interested in that? Right? That's it. Nobody. OK. Just but you gotta like say it, I'm Latino here like we gotta like show your emotions. And so what I'm really here to tell you, right? I think that the title of my talk is like, how do we build companies in the age of a I? So I just want to leave you with some basic thoughts uh in the short amount of time that I have, right? That is like the first thing is that, are you ready for this? Forget everything that you know, question everything that you hear. I hear a lot of founders right now. You know, I'm fortunate, very fortunate for an immigrant come here when I was 17, long time ago to be able to be in the States here with you today. But a lot of people that are starting companies now don't know. Right? When do you hire your first salesperson? When do you hire your first support person? Customer success? We are always looking for advice. Can you believe this is 2024? We have cha GP T cha GP T pro $200 a month and we still don't know how to run our businesses. It's crazy how hard it is right to know how to scale with the amount of customers and the time that they demand from us. And so I feel like we're always looking for advice and we contact other people and we say, tell me how can I do this, how can I do this better? But I'm here to tell you that we kind of have to maybe if we want to look at the past, we're gonna have to forget look at the past and hear what they have to say but not do it that way because A I has changed everything. I, I am so excited of building a company. I went to Sequoia and I opened my big mouth and I said, I'm gonna never hire more than 100 people. And I'm going to get to a billion in revenue and they believed it. Three B I hope they're not watching this. This is being recorded. And so what I said was something that I fundamentally believe, right? My last company, I had 800 employees and it was really hard to build a sustainable business that way, right? A lot of our companies are not profitable. And so we have to figure out how to do this more efficiently and how to do a better job of relating and connecting with our customers. And so the things that I'm doing in this company, everything is being done from the ground up through first principles. I'm challenging everything that normally entrepreneurs would do when they're building a company. So for example, in the past, I've hired as, you know, besides the founders, I've hired like an NBA person, anybody of you hired an NBA person to do great things, all this stuff you don't want to do, right? It's great. They like, they make slides and they like, I don't know, they make slides and, and they make slides, right? And so like, it's great, you don't have to, I don't have to make slides. But then another company I did, my first hire was a recruiter because that's the best way you need people to build great things. Guess what I hired for the first time this time besides engineers. Anybody guess customer support. No, I hire a lawyer. So now my first employee was a lawyer. So this lawyer, it was too early. You would think you don't need a lawyer when you're like 10 employees. But this lawyer does all the contracts. Her name is Z and she also does payroll. She also does it, she does security because we use a platform called rippling. And so we have to do more with less, we have to hire less and people have to be willing to do more because we have the power of A I, we are not, you know, I I'm doing all the sales. I'm, I'm an SDR, I'm a, I'm an A E, I'm an onboarding specialist. I'm a customer success manager. In fact, if you check me out on linkedin, my title is customer success manager and um and I'm support. So my company, I'm doing things differently. I'm challenging the norm. For example, my company, there is no support at agency that inc there will never be the only email you will use is my email. Every single customer from now on forever will email me because that's my responsibility. I'm not going to let it happen what happened before where I lost, I lost track of my customers. Right. And I'm going to use agency my own company to do so. So we have to spend less and we have to learn more. We have to challenge the norms. You see companies like Klarna that they're ditching salesforce. I didn't say that I didn't say anything bad about be off, but this is public information and they're ditching work day and they're ditching this and they're ditching that and that might not work for everyone but it might work for you. We are living in the future and you have to question those things that you thought cannot be changed in order to build the companies that would generate a billion in revenue. Just a small group of powerful and efficient people. For example, one more thing, it's like I will never use the CRM. Why, why would I buy a fiat? Right? Anybody here uses the CRM, raise your hand if you use the CRM, do you guys like your CRM? Keep your hands up if you like your CRM? Ok. Nobody does. We need to start demanding more out of software. I am here guilty to apologize. I've built software for about 30 years. Uh The makeup is hiding some of that stuff, but the reality is that most of the software that we built in the past sucked. It's terrible. I think we're worried about A I enslaving us. The old sufferer was slaving us. I mean, like if you, you guys got to go home and update your records, put in tasks and reminders to contact Elias to see if he can help you. God forbid. That's terrible. Right? And so I'm not building that, I'm not using that. I'm not building that again. I'm just telling you that we need to demand more of the software builders of the future to build software that serves you and you don't serve it, right? That understands and makes sense of all that unstructured data. You saw Romaine do that. Amazing demo, multimodality, talking to it translate in every language. I have a customer in France, they have customers in Italy, they have customers in Germany and everything is working well because we have powerful technologies like today. So I hope I left you with some thinking to do to challenge the norms, think differently and demand more from the tools that you use today. Thank you very much.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski knew GenAI was going to be a big deal, so he rushed to get on Sam Altman’s calendar when OpenAI began getting some recognition. Now, according to Siemiatkowski, the companies have a productive partnership—and even share a Slack channel.

Klarna CEO on how OpenAI partnership has allowed the company to stay ahead of the curve

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph provided by Klarna.

Leadership

Sebastian Siemiatkowski knew GenAI was going to be a big deal, so he rushed to get on Sam Altman’s calendar when OpenAI began getting some recognition. 

Klarna CEO on how OpenAI partnership has allowed the company to stay ahead of the curve


At plan. Now, we were like, um as many other, I think entrepreneurs and founders and founder led companies, you know, when you start the business, you're all about building a product. But then you start thinking about how do you organize yourself and all that. And then you look around and you read these books, like management books, like good to great or you know, all these different books, you're like, what, what do we do from that? And then you read in the newspaper, it says Google just launched 20% of creative time, which used to be big thing, you know, back in the days and like, we have to do 20% of created time for everyone and we did that and nothing happened and, you know, we put Coca Cola in the rooms free Coca Cola, ping pong tables like, and, and you know, lego in the conference rooms like we did it all right. And we've been trying and testing all of the things that like you read in the press, like you're reading too many management, I think. Exactly that was my conclusion as well. Eventually. But it took some time to reach that, you know, reach that realization. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Mi Avram and I'm Diane Brady. When I think about clarinet, I can't, I'm hard pressed to think of a bigger fan of generative A I to the point where you actually put out a press release, I think in your first month talking about how, um you know, I think it was the equivalent of 700 full time agents through chat GP T talk about how transformative that has been for you. I mean, I think it's amazing. I first of all, I would like to say something, which is that I'm actually one of the people who are kind of skeptical about new technologies. And like people have been asking me about crypto obviously for a lot of years. And I always said like if I can't convince my mom to use it, I don't understand the value of it. And so like I did, I never got my mom to understand why she would have a Bitcoin and I still haven't convinced her but she does use. But there you go. And, and so I think when Jen A I came out, it was very clear from day one that this actually has practical application, we can use it, but it's difficult to get it to practical application because it's a new technology, you have to figure it out. And as much as you will see a lot of noise currently about people doing press releases about this and that product launches, few things we have seen have actually come to like serious uh you know, results that have business impact. And so when we achieve that with uh the customer service experience, where actually the A I chat has a similar and many times higher customer satisfaction than people interacting with human agents. We felt that that was quite an interesting data point and we wanted to share that because at the same point of time, we feel a little bit that society is not necessarily and politicians are not necessarily taking enough consideration to the implications that will have on jobs, which is why obviously sharing that 700 number, we knew it was somewhat controversial and then we will create some like people with, you know, open, you know, they would, you know, react to it. But at the same point of time, we said, look in, in the short term, we hire big uh customer service companies, they have hundreds of thousands of employees. They're just going to, when we have less errands, they're going to send errands as well. These people will still have jobs. But in the longer term, in the few coming years, this will have severe and you know, big implications for society. And we think it's time to think about that more proactively. We understand you uh allowed Sam Altman from open A I um to basically use Klarna like an A I sandbox. Um So I'm just curious to hear how that relationship started. Obviously, we're seeing open A I spark some really interesting partnerships. This is definitely one of them. So tell us about it when I tried it myself first in November a little bit more than a year ago. Now, I was like, wow, this was like a Google experience back 20 years ago when I tried Google first time. But even better, I would say to some degree and like, it became very obvious to me that Sam and open A, I would be a company that would be very hard to reach very soon and a great relationship. So I was like, I better move off before it's too late. So I made sure to get the, yeah, exactly. Get on the calendar. I took a trip to San Francisco basically only to see Sam and I managed to still, it was kind of funny because I think initially the meeting was two hours and by the time I arrived it was only 30 minutes. So it was kind of a good impression of like how fast open A I's calendar were shrinking due to the interest in the company. But I think the, the point we had a meeting and I said, look, I want to be a great partner and I know, you know, afterwards I heard a little bit they were like, really a European bank. Are they going to be one of our most like forward leaning partners. But since then we created joint slack channel and we've had like a lot of good interactions and like just testing and you know, saying we want to try that, we want to try that and provide a lot of like good meaningful feedback to them about how the API S work and what could be working better. And I think it's, it's helped establish us as a, as a good partner of theirs. There's such a mixing maturity of application and utilization of A I cross companies. You'll have everything from people like are very much leaning in to like people that are still like, oh this, I'm not sure how this is going to work. And is it, what about data? What about hallucinations? What about this and that? But for the people leaning in, there's a capacity issue, like there's a clear capacity issue where like there's not enough electricity, there's not a lot of, you know, uh there's not a lot of processing power. And so like leaning in and making sure to be a customer that's actually, you know, we just want to buy and we want to make sure we're easy to work with actually benefits us in that case because it becomes easier to get, you know, access to the processing power that we need. And so it's been very helpful for us since I think it just allows us to stay slightly ahead of the curve. Uh which is what we're trying to do. You're the first person I know who's used the Toyota way applied to something that's not manufacturing. I think of tape on the floor and very kind of distinct modular management practices to apply it to the financial services sector is really interesting. Well, and I think it's very fun that you say that because I, I'm not going to say which company this was, but I talked to one of the largest banks in the world and their chairman is from the manufacturing industry and he was quite disappointed that the bank that he was a chairman of wasn't like more applying these practices. I think to some degree, the thing with banking, right? Which is interesting. And I think there was a research that showed that like bank is banking is the only industry in the last 150 years that basically has zero productivity gains in the last 150 years, right? Like as opposed to manufacturing a lot of huge price. And I think the reason for that is because we regulated banks so much, there's actually a very limited competition to be fair. Like once you reach that size, the competition is actually quite limited. And so as a consequence, the excess wealth that is created has been distributed to the employees of the banks and the shareholders, right? Which is why we also used to have these tremendously high compensation. Now after 2007, it's come down a little bit but, and so there hasn't been that strong incentive and as much as officially banks are so well regulated with policies and instructions, like in a lot of banks, those compliance parts live a parallel life to reality. Um, which is also why we're still seeing things happening and things blowing up now and then. Um, so I think that like really applying them in practice is, is actually an interesting challenge and, and, and has a lot of opportunity in itself.

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