Australia's biggest bank has cut jobs in its customer call centres in favour of an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that will answer customer inquiries.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
A total of 90 jobs were axed at the Commonwealth Bank, including 45 roles in direct banking, due to the introduction of a new voice bot system on the bank's inbound customer enquiries line.
A Commonwealth Bank spokesperson confirmed the job losses to ACM, the publisher of this masthead.
"Our investment in technology, including AI, is making it easier and faster for customers to get help, especially in our call centres," the spokesperson said.
"By automating simple queries, our teams can focus on more complex customer queries that need empathy and experience."
The CBA spokesperson said the priority was to "explore opportunities for redeployment" for affected staff and to support employees with "care, dignity and respect".
Finance Sector Union national secretary Julia Angrisano criticised the job cuts, saying workers want a tech-savvy bank, but "they expect to be part of the change, not replaced by it".
"Our members want to be trained and supported into better jobs that leverage AI," Ms Angrisano said.
"Yet rather than invest in its people, the CBA is simply discarding Australians through ongoing redundancies and offshoring.
"If this is what CEO Matt Comyn calls productivity, we're seriously concerned about his place at the national productivity roundtable.
"His carefully curated commitment to policy reform in Australia just looks like hollow PR when acts like this expose that his real agenda is just more profit for shareholders."
Carla Mascarenhas
Carla Mascarenhas is a journalist with Explore Travel and The Senior. She specialises in deep issues affecting Gen X and beyond, and the latest in travel news. Contact her on carla.mascarenhas@austcommunitymedia.com.au
