Two months ago, the Commonwealth Bank replaced 45 customer service workers with an artificial intelligence chatbot, creating the first cohort of Australian workers to officially be made redundant by AI.
Another CBA worker, Dhanushi Jayatileka, who was also recently made redundant, says she is one of many workers to unofficially lose her job to AI, in a trend that is reshaping the nation’s labour market behind closed doors.
Jayatileka, who worked in the bank’s back office for four years, says her team had been shedding staff since 2024, leaving those remaining to lean on AI to replace work conducted by their former colleagues.
“We are teaching the machine to eventually take our job,” says Jayatileka, who is being supported by the Finance Sector Union.
“We need to look after people first.”
Experts warn that Australia’s major companies are cutting thousands of white-collar finance and technology jobs with the help of accelerating use of AI, without publicly accepting the job losses and new technology is linked.
Manju Ahuja, a professor of information systems and technology management at the University of New South Wales, says there is an “observable” link between workforce changes and the uptake of AI tools.
“It is the tip of the iceberg [because] many AI-related job losses are just not officially recorded,” she says.
Sales, customer service and entry-level white-collar jobs are among the roles vulnerable to being automated into AI, according to a study by the University of Queensland (UQ). Similar findings were made by the government’s Jobs and Skills agency last month.
“Where you can standardise it to just one task, that job goes,” says the UQ adjunct professor and study co-author Evan Shellshear.
Shellshear says demand for consulting and accounting graduates and clerks is already slipping in Australia, as senior staff turn to AI to automatically complete the traditionally menial work assigned to junior colleagues.
CBA has said that recent redundancies, with the exception of the 45 customer service roles, were not related to the increased takeup of AI. A spokesperson said the bank could not comment on individual employee cases.
The spokesperson said CBA’s total workforce had increased since 2021, with more staff added in non-automated areas even as others were cut.
CBA is one of several big Australian companies to promote the improved efficiencies created by AI in recent months.
It says business bank queries are answered three times faster, engineers’ code change output and automated customer service interactions have risen by a third and fifth respectively, and call centre wait times have fallen.
ANZ on Tuesday announced it would sack 3,500 of its 40,000-plus…
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