Amid growing fears of AI driven job losses, especially in the tech sector, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters warned on the future of the bank's workforce, stating that the artificial intelligence boost will slash thousands of roles as the lender replaces “lower-value human capital” with technology, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The lender unveiled a plan on Tuesday to cut over 15% of its support staff by 2030 through building up its use of AI to streamline operations. It employed about 52,000 people in such roles at the end of last year across India, China, Poland, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
“It's not cost cutting; it's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in,”the report quoted Winters at a briefing in Hong Kong on Tuesday, noting that impacted staff would receive “good clear notice” ahead of time.
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“We don't have job losses, but we do have job role reductions in favour of the machines, and that will accelerate as we go forward into AI,” he said.
These remarks come amid growing sentiments among global financial leaders over the realities of automation, shifting away from previous narratives that framed AI purely as a tool to augment, rather to replace human workers.
Last year, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon compared AI's disruptive potential to the invention of the steam engine, stating that the bank's annual savings from the technology now equal its yearly AI expenditures, while Goldman Sachs Group President and Chief Operating Officer John Waldron recently described portions of the firm's traditional operations as a “human assembly line” prime for automation.
Half of adults in the US have been concerned about AI's proliferation, the report said citing data from Pew Research Center study, while local opposition to the construction of power-hungry data centers has intensified.
Notably, global regulators are criticising the banking sector's rapid adoption of advanced systems, the report said. Wall Street firms have started internally experimenting with Anthropic PBC's Mythos model, which has been encouraged by US administration officials to help detect digital vulnerabilities. Officials have cautioned that the widespread integration of AI has armed bad actors, resulting in a latest form of cyberattacks in the global financial industry.
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