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Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
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Finance & Banking
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Industry Specific
Country’s Largest Lender Bank Offers to Reinstate 45 ‘Redundant’ Workers
A plan by one of Australia’s largest employers to cut call center employees and shuffle the work to chatbots backfired after the large language models failed to reduce the volume of calls.
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The Commonwealth Bank of Australia in July said it could cut 45 call center jobs thanks to customer-facing chat bots, which it asserted cut volume by 2,000 calls a week. It admitted last Thursday that artificial intelligence did not actually cut down the number of customers needing to speak to a human.
The bank’s plan “did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations, and this error meant the roles were not redundant,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.
The about-face came after the Finance Sector Union took the cuts to the country’s labor relations board. Call volumes “were in fact increasing and CBA was scrambling to manage the situation by offering staff overtime and directing team leaders to answer calls,” the union said in a Thursday statement. The union also alleged that the bank appeared to be hiring similar call center roles in India, raising the possibility that the AI narrative might have been a cover for a more conventional outsourcing strategy.
For the 45 workers selected to be laid off, “the damage has already been done,” the union said. These employees “have had to endure the stress and worry of facing redundancy” and were “suddenly confronted with the prospect of being unable to pay their bills.” Union officials told Ars Technica that they expect “a high number” of the fired staff to take redundancy payments rather than return, given how they’ve been treated.
Bloomberg analysis projects that banks will eliminate up to 200,000 positions globally within the next five years, with back office, middle office and operations roles facing the greatest risk.
Controversy hasn’t deterred CBA from pursuing AI initiatives. The bank earlier this month announced a partnership with OpenAI to “explore advanced generative AI solutions that aim to strengthen scam and fraud detection and deliver more personalized services” for customers. Bank executives claim the initiative will “invest in our people and their AI proficiency so they can better support our customers” and “embed the responsible use of AI across its workforce.” The CBA has also detailed its adoption of GitHub Copilot for software development.
The union warned that CBA’s flip-flopping on AI serves as a “stark reminder to all of us that we can never trust employers to do the right thing by workers, and change can happen at any time and impact any one of us.”
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