Australia’s Commonwealth Bank has decided not to fire 45 workers it planned to replace with an AI chatbot.
The Bank told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the sackings in late July, and said the introduction of AI had reduced call volumes by allowing automation of simple queries. The bank intended for the chatbot to leave staff able to handle tougher queries, even once it cut employee numbers.
The Bank was wrong, and on Thursday it apologized to the staff it let go .
Australia’s Finance Sector Union welcomed what it called a “backflip” and claimed call volumes rose at the Bank, leading to increased overtime for the remaining staff and management being drafted to help answer phones.
It’s unclear if the AI failed to perform as hoped, or if the bank botched something else.
While the Union is celebrating, many more fights with the Commonwealth Bank probably lie ahead as it recently announced a partnership with OpenAI “to bring advanced AI to customers and employees” and “deliver more personalised services for CommBank customers.”
The Bank has also adopted AI tools to help its software developers, yesterday detailing how it adopted GitHub Copilot, “with mixed results in utilisation and efficacy.”
Distinguished engineer Brent McKendrick said the version of Copilot used at the bank “was simply an AI powered auto-complete engine”. It has since created “Run-time agents” that McKendrick said “can provide solutions to problems that we could not readily solve before, such as dynamic customer service bots, real-time transcription and summarisation, intelligent document analysis, etc.”
So clearly the Bank plans to revisit use of AI on its customer service frontlines.
Commonwealth Bank employs over 55,000 people, and officials have pointed out that while the chatbot saw it shed 45 staff, it hired thousands last year. ®