CBA replaces 90 support staff with AI chatbot – Information Age | ACS
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By David Braue on Jul 31 2025 12:42 PM
Companies love them, customers tolerate them, and generative AI (genAI) is making them useful – but as dozens of Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) customer service staff are learning, it’s clear the worst fears about chatbots were true all along.
Some 45 Direct Banking workers have been made redundant since an AI chatbot started handling inbound customer enquiries in June, the bank has confirmed, with another 45 Customer Messaging Specialist staff – the other side of your online chats – set to follow.
Reports suggest the AI chatbots have diverted 2,000 calls per week from the bank’s contact centres, with a CBA spokesperson telling Information Age that “our investment in technology, including AI, is making it easier and faster for customers to get help.”
“By automating simple queries,” they added, “our teams can focus on more complex customer queries that need empathy and experience.”
Staff movement is inevitable during such changes as “some roles and work can change”, the spokesperson said, as executives “review the skills we need and how we’re organised to deliver the best customer experiences and outcomes.”
“Based on individual situations, many of our people have taken up the upskilling and reskilling pathways made available for them,” they said, adding that the bank was committed to “support affected employees with care, dignity, and respect.”
The Finance Sector Union (FSU) isn’t buying CBA’s reassurances, with national secretary Julia Angrisano arguing that “workers want a tech-savvy bank, but they expect to be part of the change, not replaced by it.”
Workers “want to be supported into better jobs that leverage AI,” she said, “yet rather than invest in its people, CBA are simply discarding Australians.… [CEO Matt Comyn’s] carefully curated commitment to policy reform just looks like hollow PR.”
Confirmation of the cuts comes just months after an Australian Financial Review report that last September said the bank was testing a genAI chatbot, called Hey CommBank, that would eventually replace many of the bank’s 2,400 contact centre staff.
Asked about those reports at the company’s 2024 annual general meeting the next month, Comyn dismissed the report as “perhaps… a little ahead of itself.”
“We are very focused on being able to improve the customer experience,” he said, suggesting AI chatbots might be most useful in managing surges in customer enquiries during a mass fraud or other “times of particular concern.”
“Whilst there is certainly potential with AI,” he said, “it will take some time before we’ll be confident that we can control for all the risks, and be able to manage that safely at scale…. It’s an important policy area and an area that we are engaging with our regulators.”
Nine months later, dozens of contact centre workers are out of jobs and the bank is again in damage control with the FSU, which only a fortnight ago revealed CBA’s underhanded plan to swap Australian software jobs for cheaper equivalents in India.
“There is a human cost to this,” Angrisano said. “You can’t just replace frontline jobs with a voice bot and expect the same service for customers.”
Despite years of executives reassuring skittish workers that AI was going to help and not replace them, the mindboggling sophistication of today’s genAI platforms has seen the reassuring voices of stability drowned out by a marching band of AI advocates.
Based on its bold changes and quiet denials, CBA – which has invested significantly in AI in recent years, including extensive pilot tests and the inking of a ‘foundational AI research’ partnership with the University of Adelaide last year – is right up there in front.
Call centre wait times at CBA, for example, dropped by 40 per cent in a year after AI-driven messaging was added to its mobile app while using AI in areas like fraud detection and prevention has cut customer fraud reports by a third, and losses by half.
Optus is also singing AI’s praises, recently launching an agentic AI solution that analyses calls and gives staff real-time data to resolve queries faster, with current AI agents already fielding 2.2 million enquiries over 12 months, in under two minutes each.
Unfortunately for workers, CBA spends $7.5 billion on staff per year and AI’s potential to reduce this, while improving customer satisfaction metrics, would have resonated in its boardroom, just as at firms known to have already replaced staff with AI.
The benefits are so good that AI adopters are hastening the transition to a nightmare scenario characterised by what the Social Policy Group (SPG) last year warned would be an AI-driven ‘great retrenchment’ that could affect one-third of Australia’s workforce by 2030.
“For larger businesses, a substitution for labour with little expenditure is a straight increase in profit,” the SPG said, warning that “workforce displacement is a consequence of AI triggering a sudden debasement in the value of selective labour.”
Ironically, it’s even happening in India – the beneficiary of CBA’s alleged labour malfeasance – where IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced it will cut 12,000 middle and senior management jobs as AI automation digs in deep.
SPG fears Australia’s relatively non-complex economy, which is overdependent on knowledge economy jobs to maintain unemployment, will make it “one of the worst-hit OECD countries” as AI replaces once “aspirational and secure” knowledge-based jobs.
“Without immediate intervention,” SPG warns, “Australia risks large-scale redundancies within the next five years, spreading from low-income jobs to high-income and high-skilled positions [and putting many SMBs on] unsustainable trajectories.”
David Braue is an award-winning technology journalist who has covered Australia’s technology industry since 1995. A lifelong technophile, he has written and edited content for a broad range of audiences across myriad consumer and business topics, with a particular focus on managing the intersection of technological innovation and business transformation. He has twice won Best IT Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, and was named Best Technology Journalist at the 2024 Australian Technologies Competition.
