- Australian Commbank announced that 45 workers would be replaced with AI
- But the decision is now reversed after AI failed to live up to humans
- Workers have received an apology from commbank
Australia’s Commonwealth Bank has provided a useful example of how not To introduce AI tools after being forced into an embarrassing climate.
The bank had recently announced that 45 customer service staff would be cut and replaced with an AI -driven ‘voice bot’ in an attempt to reduce call quantities and automate less complex answers – leaving a small number of employees to handle the remaining more complex queries.
It turns out that these bots were unable to handle the tasks that the workers could – and now that these cut employees will now be resumed.
‘Backflip’
The bank claimed that ‘voting bot’ led to a reduction in calls, but Australia’s Financial Sector Association contests this claim, and noted, “Members told us that this was a direct lie and did not reflect the reality of what happened in direct bank. Call volumes actually rose, and CBA was in the process of shrinking to control the situation by offering staff overtime overtime
The bank issued an apology to the staff affected by the proposed job cuts and turned the decision. A Bank spokesperson told Techradar Pro that the initial assessment ‘did not consider sufficiently all relevant business considerations and this error meant that the roles were not superfluous.’
“We have apologized for the affected employees and acknowledge that we should have been more thorough in our assessment of the required roles. We are currently supporting affected employees and have given them elections to continue in their current roles, persecuted redistribution within CBA or to continue to leave the organization.”
That said, Commbank does not completely condemn the technology after recently announcing a partnership with Openai to develop scams and fraud-up-up solutions as well as ‘provide more personalized services’ to his clients.
For months, concerns about job losses in the hands of AI were dismissed, where companies assured that only the most basic and everyday admin tasks would be handled by bots, which lets the workers focus on the more creative aspects of their roles.
Those in administrative positions that handle almost exclusively everyday tasks have warned that these models, although sometimes useful, cannot replace human experience and understanding.
It is undeniable that AI replaces workers, with hundreds of jobs at companies such as IBM and Crowdstrike disappears as people have been made more dispensable thanks to the technique.
But not all of these cost -saving decisions work. In Britain, over half of all companies that replaced workers with AI already regret their decision, and are no less likely to believe that AI will replace human workers.
