A Commonwealth Bank employee who trained an artificial intelligence chatbot that later took her job has confronted the bank’s top executives in front of shareholders.
Kathryn Sullivan was one of 45 customer service employees whose roles were made redundant in late July, before they were offered a chance to stay with the bank after the Finance Sector Union brought a case before the Fair Work Commission.
“Not all the jobs that were offered back were the same job that these people were made redundant from,” Sullivan said on Wednesday at the bank’s annual general meeting at the Gabba in Brisbane.
During a recent discussion, a pressing question was posed about the measures in place to protect current employees from the risk of their positions being replaced by artificial intelligence or offshored. “I just wanted to know what specific measures, if any, you have in place now to safeguard current staff from having their roles displaced by AI, and also offshoring,” the inquiry went.
The 63-year-old said she was made redundant after 25 years with the bank, which is Australia’s most valuable public company, and had spent the past few years working on teaching its “Bumblebee” chatbot how to respond to customers.
She expected to be redeployed once her work developing scripts and testing responses was finished, but she was instead told her services were no longer required.
“We made a mistake,” Commonwealth Bank chairman Paul O’Malley said, acknowledging how difficult the process had been for Sullivan.
“We didn’t adequately consider all the relevant business considerations. And I think that’s been communicated.”
Chief executive Matt Comyn added the bank sometimes had to make difficult decisions that impacted employees.
Addressing this concern, Matt Comyn, the CEO and managing director of Commonwealth Bank, acknowledged the importance of employee engagement. He emphasized the bank’s commitment to developing and retaining skills among its workforce as a top priority moving forward. “I think the way we engage with employees, how we try to develop and retain as many of those skills as we can, is really important, and that’s certainly a priority for us going forward,” Comyn stated.
Comyn also noted that sometimes the bank is faced with making challenging decisions that affect its staff. He highlighted the bank’s record-breaking profit of $10.1 billion for the year ending June 30, pointing out that this impressive figure could have been even greater had the bank more fully harnessed the potential of AI technologies.
Reflecting on the rapid technological advancements over the past decade and a half, Comyn remarked, “Fifteen years ago … we didn’t do everything on our phones.” His comment underscores the transformative impact of technology on business operations and the evolving landscape in which the bank operates.
While customers once engaged with the bank in branches during traditional opening hours, they now expected staff to be available around the clock, O’Malley said.
“So it actually makes sense to have people operating in different time zones to support that 24/7 service for our customers,” he said.
“Better customer engagement does require different ways of thinking.”
Comyn said that CBA had just over 6,800 employees in India, including 3,000 staff working to combat financial crimes, and 37,000 employees in Australia.
“It’s not that we aren’t looking in Australia and we are continuing to hire and we are bringing capability,” he said.
The bank has also opened a tech hub in Seattle, where it sends a rotating group of about 200 Australian staff each year to increase their skills.
It has also partnered with Griffith University and the University of South Australia to develop local skills.
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