CBA replaced hundreds of offshore roles with AI; Bloomberg
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The news: Hundreds of overseas workers supporting CBA’s chat service have lost their jobs as the bank incorporated AI into the system, according to people familiar with the work cited by Bloomberg.
The context: Many of the affected workers were contractors at a call centre near Johannesburg run by South African outsourcing company Nutun.
Current and former Nutun employees said AI was handling a growing share of their work as CBA scaled back its contract with the company.
One person familiar with the operation told Bloomberg the changes would save the bank tens of millions of dollars a year.
In a recent post on their website, Microsoft said it had worked with CBA to build a messaging platform that uses AI to triage customer queries and resolve them where possible.
Rachel Round, CBA’s general manager of self-service experiences, said about 85% of self-service messaging interactions were resolved within the messaging channel in May this year.
In July last year, ABC News reported that CBA had reversed plans to cut 45 Australian jobs after its AI-powered chatbot increased, rather than reduced, the number of customer service calls.
What was said: A Commonwealth Bank spokesperson told Bloomberg the lender had added more than 140 roles at Australian call centres over the past six months. Nutun did not comment.
