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Singapore’s biggest bank plans to cut 4,000 jobs as it expects artificial intelligence to take on more work currently done by human employees.
The chief executive of the Development Bank of Singapore said the job cuts would be phased out over the next three years.
“My current projection in the next three years, we will shrink our workforce by about 4,000 or 10 per cent,” Piyush Gupta said at an industry conference in Mumbai, India, on Monday.
The outgoing chief executive, however, said 1,000 new positions would be added in AI.
Mr Gupta is one of the first major banking chiefs to lay out details of possible job losses due to AI. “In my 15 years of being a CEO, for the first time, I’m struggling to create jobs. So far, I’ve always had a line of sight to what jobs I can create,” he said, according to Reuters. “This time I’m struggling to say how will I repurpose people to create jobs.”
A DBS spokesperson explained that the reduction in workforce would come from natural attrition as temporary and contract positions roll off over the next few years.
DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest lender, has 8,000 to 9,000 contractual and temporary workers, who are at risk of being terminated. Permanent staff would not be affected, the outgoing chief executive said.
A Bloomberg Intelligence report last month said global banks were expected to cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as AI encroached on tasks currently carried out by humans.
Mr Gupta reportedly said last year that his bank had been working on AI for over a decade. “We today deploy over 800 AI models across 350 use cases and expect the measured economic impact of these to exceed S$1bn (£592m),” he claimed.
A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research warned that AI would likely have a “seismic impact” on the economy and society, particularly in sectors reliant on computer-based tasks.
The think tank’s analysis of 22,000 common tasks performed by human workers found that up to 70 per cent of computer-based roles could be significantly altered or even eliminated by AI.
