CBA doubles down on AI despite staff sacking ‘error’
The fight to stop Australia’s biggest bank replacing people with machines is far from over despite CBA admitting to a major ‘error’.
Commonwealth Bank is determined to power ahead with its aggressive artificial intelligence strategy to make itself more “globally competitive” despite botching a plan to replace dozens of staff with bots.
CBA made a rare admission to the Fair Work Commission that it failed to read the room when it sacked 45 call centre staff in July, a decision it overturned on Thursday.
The AI-powered “voice bot” did not deliver the benefits it promised, sparking chaos. Call volumes surged, leaving “management scrambling to offer overtime and pull team leaders onto the phones”.
The Financial Services Union said the backflip was a “win” but the “fight to stop Australia’s biggest bank replacing people in secure jobs with machines is far from over”.
CBA – which has struck partnerships with Amazon, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and Anthropic – said it would perform more tasks using AI.
“CBA’s initial assessment that the 45 roles in our Customer Service Direct business 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.”
Global call centre operator Teleperformance says while AI can deliver significant benefits, it warned about “divesting staff” and failing to account for the reputational risks.
“When it comes to AI in tech, it should be the walk, run and sprint,” Teleperformance Australian vice president Richard Valente said. “It’s a responsibility for any organisation that is implementing AI to ensure that their employees and their staff and their customers are well aware of what they’re implementing and it better work.
“You have to be risk averse when it comes to AI and anything client facing. If it doesn’t work, it’s a disaster.”
CBA’s backflip came as Mr Comyn spent this week in Canberra at the productivity roundtable discussion with Jim Chalmers and ACTU secretary Sally McManus.
The Albanese government expects AI to inject up to $600bn a year into the economy by 2030. But most Australian companies are struggling to adopt the technology at scale and realise the productivity gains, prompting Mr Comyn and Telstra boss Vicki Brady to urge staff to use it daily.
“To be globally competitive, Australia must embrace this new era of rapid technological change,” Mr Comyn said last week when announcing the OpenAI partnership.
A CBA spokesman said on Thursday that the bank was offering the 45 employees, who were initially sacked, their current roles, to be redeployed or “proceed with leaving the organisation”.
But the Financial Services Union national secretary Julia Angrisano said the “damage is already done” for the 45 workers who “endured weeks of unnecessary stress, not knowing if they would be able to pay bills or support their families”.
“CBA has been caught out trying to dress up job cuts as innovation. Using AI as a cover for slashing secure jobs is a cynical cost-cutting exercise, and workers know it,” Ms Angrisano said.
“Our members want to be part of the conversation about how new technology is used in banking. They want secure jobs today and the training needed for the jobs of the future, not to be discarded under the guise of efficiency.
“CBA likes to talk about being a digital leader, but real leadership means investing in your people, not tossing them aside and blaming the technology.”
US enterprise software giant Workday last week warned of companies rushing to sack staff and replace them with AI.
Workday vice president of AI, Kathy Pham, said trust was becoming the new currency in the AI revolution, and the technology still has limitations that employers need to be mindful of.
“When we blanket cut jobs without understanding all the tasks and goals of that job, we will miss all the pieces that person did.
“So we have to really understand all the components of work and then figure out, ‘OK, here’s what AI will be really good at. Maybe it’s packing butter. Maybe it’s lifting 1000 tons, because no single human can do that. Maybe it’s reading 80,000 papers overnight’. They’re all these things that technology can do.
“And then we figure out which pieces we want to keep that’s very uniquely human, and either reassign people or retrain or even create new roles to match that. That’s how I view the future of how we think about our workforce.”
Meanwhile, research that Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation commissioned revealed Australians want stricter regulation over AI – putting it odds with Tech Council of Australia chair Scott Farquhar, who argues the uncertainty around future laws was already harming the nation.
Minderoo’s research, which involved more than 2000 Australians, found that 61 per cent of Australians prefer a balanced but firm approach to AI regulation – one that protects people while fostering innovation.
But when a balanced approach was removed, support for strict regulation jumped to 64 per cent – even if that meant sacrificing innovation and productivity.
Minderoo Foundation chief executive John Hartman said the findings did not mean that Australians were anti-AI.
“Australians see the productivity potential of AI, but they don’t want it to come at the cost of safety and privacy. They’re looking to government to step up with clear and balanced rules that allow innovation while protecting people,” Mr Hartman told this masthead.
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