How CBA set the tone as corporate Australia faces AI jobs crossroads
Australia’s biggest bank tried to avoid a public backlash as it made one of the first moves by a blue chip company to shed staff amid AI disruption.
Just two weeks ago, Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn dismissed the doomsayer projections about the impact of artificial intelligence. “I don’t think it’s going to have as significant an impact on the labour force as perhaps some have predicted,” Comyn told Capital Brief in a post-results interview after the bank delivered a $5.4 billion half-year profit.
On Tuesday, CBA axed 300 mostly technology-based roles. There was no public announcement — a media release from the Financial Services Union revealed the cuts, while CBA made no mention of them as it simultaneously announced a new $90 million training program to skill up its employees in the age of AI.
For a bank of CBA’s size — it has 55,000 employees and a market value of nearly $300 billion — the cuts are not particularly large. But viewed through a wider lens, they are enormously significant.
While CBA hasn’t directly linked the redundancies to AI, Tuesday’s after-hours news confirmed the first moves by a blue chip Australian corporate to shed staff as it braces for technological disruption. Just one day later $16 billion software provider WiseTech went much further — slashing 2,000 jobs, or about a quarter of its workforce, openly stating that it did so because of rapid advances in products developed by Anthropic and OpenAI.
