Meet the workers being replaced by AI

Are you panicking about AI taking your job yet?

The financial services sector is Australia’s proverbial canary in the coal mine on AI job transformation. And the bird’s starting to look a bit peaky.

Kathryn Sullivan worked for Commonwealth Bank for 25 years, the past five in the customer messaging team. She told a union symposium Wednesday that she and 44 colleagues – who a couple of weeks ago found themselves sacked, then un-sacked – had never expected to get the boot.

“We knew that messaging would eventually be sent offshore, but never in my wildest dream did I expect to be made redundant after 25 years with the company,” Sullivan said.

“Inadvertently, I was training a chatbot that took my job.”

Meanwhile, Bank of Queensland and ANZ are busy at the whetstone sharpening their own hatchets for outsourcing, offshoring, and AI bot-ification.

BoQ revealed it will send 200-odd roles into the ether as part of a new deal with French tech company Capgemini to develop AI agents. And ANZ staff are bracing for impact, anticipating an unknown number of redundancies as part of a long-flagged restructure, the details of which remain murky.

The mood is grim at the leading lender after chief executive Nuno Matos also sent an email directing managers to reprimand staff for poor office attendance and threatening to dock pay for anyone failing to place their bum in an office swivel seat at least 50 per cent of the time.

On the other hand, NAB CEO Andrew Irvine told a customer event Wednesday that his bank wasn’t looking to use AI to reduce its headcount – but it would be swapping out any staff that failed to upskill.

That’s a lot of pressure, but the bosses are feeling it too. PwC CEO Kevin Burrowes told my colleague Hannah Tattersall he’s spending his weekends doing AI homework.

The Productivity Commission did warn we were in for a painful period of transition as the economy strides towards a projected $116 billion AI bump over the next decade. Omelettes and eggs and all that, I guess.

In case you’re feeling pretty depressed right about now, I recommend a moment of respite with this piece by professional services editor Edmund Tadros on 11 ways companies are using AI to do some really good stuff. Perked me right back up.

And if you’re worried about how your kids are going to fare in the workforce of the future, you can read about a new movement to build university-level credentialing into high school programs.

Looking into next week, I’ll be tuning in for some of the Gartner IT Symposium to get across the latest research on AI in the C-suite, and I’m interested to hear what Telstra boss Vicki Brady has to say about the country’s digital future at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

Until next time: don’t forget to touch some grass, read about how you can use neuroscience to hack your brain for a more productive day, and have a great weekend.

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