Last month, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski boasted that he hadn't hired anyone in a year as a result of his company embracing AI.Klarna's workforce had shrunk by about 22 percent since doubling down roughly a year ago. Meanwhile, the company has amassed a valuation of well over $14 billion, in what Siemiatkowski frames as a financially successful bid to cash in on the hype surrounding AI.The fintech company, which offers "buy now, pay later" services for the e-commerce industry, made a big fuss about its OpenAI ChatGPT integration, gushing that its AI assistant could do the work of "700 full-time agents" in a February press release.But that kind of purportedly superhuman productivity could have dire consequences for the job security of practically anybody at the company including its CEO, as it turns out.That's something experts have long warned could be a possibility in the age of AI automation. In simple terms, it's not just low-level grunt work that's on the chopping block: high-level executives could equally be made redundant by genuinely clever AI."To me AI is capable of doing all our jobs, my own included," Siemiatkowski wrote in a lengthy tweet on Sunday."Because our work is simply reasoning combined with knowledge/experience," he argued. "And the most critical breakthrough, reasoning, is behind us."But being out of a job because of your own commitment to AI is something that Siemiatkowski is "not super excited" about."My work to me is a super important part of who I am, and realizing it might become unnecessary is gloomy," he wrote. "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."Researchers have already studied the possibility of CEOs becoming an endangered species in the age of AI."My first instinct is they would say, 'Replace all the employees but not me,'" former director of MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab Anant Agarwal toldThe New York Times last year. "But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a CEO does can be replaced by AI."Beyond a gleeful sense of justice felt by low-level employees everywhere, ditching CEOs could also free up considerable funds. The average CEO makes around $16 million, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and that's without getting into the incompetence of many top-level executives.In a December interview with Bloomberg, Siemiatkowski claimed that roughly 200 Klarna employees were using AI for their core work.And the CEO is egging them on, even promising them a bigger payout."Were going to give some of the improvements that the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases," he told the outlet.Siemiatkowski also argued that he was happy to take up president-elect Donald Trump's offer to receive "fully expedited approvals and permits" for investing $1 billion in the US.For now, AI taking over the job of a C-suiter or virtually anyone doing any serious work, regardless of Siemiatkowski's claims remains far-fetched. As of right now, the technology still suffers from frequent "hallucinations" and struggles with basic reasoning tasks."The idea of AI performing every human job, including that of a CEO, still remains more speculative than realistic at this point," AI avatar company Genies CEO Akash Nigam told Fortune. The "CEOs role requires not just strategic thinking but probably more importantly, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and nuanced leadership qualities that AI cannot fully replicate yet."And the many shortcomings of AI haven't flown over the head of Siemiatkowski either."However, how exactly we will combine those building blocks of reason and knowledge to replicate the work we do today is not yet entirely solved," he admitted in his Sunday tweet."Exactly how long it will take for the world to figure this out, who knows for sure?" he added. "But I think we can all agree it is not in the 100s of years."More on replacing CEOs with AI: CEO Says He Hasn't Hired Anyone in a Year as He Replaces Human Workers With AIShare This Article