‘Made a mistake’: Former CBA worker confronts banking bosses over AI redundancies
A Commonwealth Bank worker who was replaced by AI after 25 years at the company has confronted banking executives in a public forum.
A long time Commonwealth Bank (CBA) worker who unwittingly trained her own AI replacement before being made redundant has confronted the banking bosses over the move.
Kathryn Sullivan was made redundant from CBA in July alongside 44 others in what were the first job cuts directly attributed to an Australian company’s uptake of AI.
She had been at the company for 25 years.
Last month, Ms Sullivan told an AI symposium held in Canberra that she had no idea her work developing scripts and testing responses for the chatbot Bumblebee would put her out of a job.
The 45 employees who were made redundant were later offered a chance to stay with the company after the Finance Sector Union brought a case before the Fair Work Commission.
Ms Sullivan decided not to take up a role that was offered to her because she found it unsuitable.
MORE: What you need to know about being made redundant
On Wednesday, CBA held its annual general meeting (AGM) in Brisbane, where the top executives took questions from staff and shareholders.
At the meeting, Ms Sullivan noted that “not all the jobs that were offered back were the same job that these people had been made redundant from”.
“I just wanted to know what specific measures, if any, you have in place now to safeguard current staff from having their roles displaced by AI, and also offshoring,” she said.
“Can you please outline what guard rails you have or policies that have been introduced to support job security and transparency in this period of technological change.”
Commonwealth Bank chairman Paul O’Malley said that the bank had “made a mistake” in its assessment that the 45 roles were no longer required.
“We didn’t adequately consider all the relevant business considerations. And I think that’s been communicated,” he said.
“We have to be very thorough in the way that we support our people, we do have to make changes in the business from time to time, that is inevitable.”
However, he said when changes do need to happen it needs to be done “respectfully” and they “can’t afford to make mistakes”.
“We have addressed the learnings from those situations - future processes are baked in such that the risk of that happening again is very much mitigated,” Mr O’Malley said.
Chief executive Matt Comyn also addressed Ms Sullivan, noting that when the bank makes changes to technology it is on them to “engage appropriately and determine whether any roles will be impacted”.
“In this particular instance when we did that assessment we incorrectly estimated the demand for those roles going forward,” he said.
“We basically incorrectly calculated that those roles wouldn’t be required, whereas indeed they were required and so had to re-engage with employees.”
MORE: 6 essential workplace skills in the age of AI
He said the way the company engages with employees and how they try to develop and retain as “many of those skills as we can” would be a “priority” for the company moving forward.
After her role training the chatbot, Bumblebee, was finished, Ms Sullivan expected to be redeployed, saying that never in her “wildest dream” did she expect to be made redundant after 25 years with the company.
“While I embrace the use of AI and I can see a purpose for it in the workplace and outside, I believe there needs to be some sort of regulation to prevent copyright (infringements) … or replacing humans,” she said last month.
“You still need the human touch.”
CBA initially said that using the chatbot reduced calls to the centre by 2000 per week, but then conceded in August that calls had increased after the sackings.
“CBA’s initial assessment that the 45 roles were not required did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations and this error meant the roles were not redundant,” a spokesman said.
“We have apologised to the employees concerned and acknowledge we should have been more thorough in our assessment of the roles required. We are also reviewing our internal processes to improve our approach going forward.”
- with Heath Parkes-Hupton
