Morning Coffee: Three banks announced major job cuts yesterday. The zombies and monsters trying to put bankers in jail
Environmentalists have a saying that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it”. Similarly, it’s possible to worry that the effect of AI on employment is going to manifest itself as a series of seemingly unrelated stories about mass redundancies that gets closer and closer, until you’re the one being fired.
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On a day when we’ve had announcements of 1,400 job cuts from Visa, 1,400 more from Santander and an unspecified but “inevitable” number from HSBC, it might be a good opportunity to ask ourselves whether the clouds are getting closer. Is this just a coincidence, the vagaries of the business cycle, or something more structurally sinister?
None of the announcements actually say that the jobs are being replaced by artificial intelligence, which ought to be quite evidential itself – most companies love to mention their AI strategy on the slimmest pretext. But if we look a bit deeper, and think about the length of strategic planning horizons, the picture’s not so clear.
The majority of the Santander cuts are being made possible “as we simplify and automate” the UK operations, taking advantage of the global shift to online banking. That’s a trend that’s been going on for more than a decade, albeit that a large part of the reason that banks expect to be able to do more with less as customer service moves online is that language models are getting better at providing canned responses and triaging messages.
Similarly, although Visa is cutting some merchant sales roles and slimming down its global partnerships, at least 1,000 of the job cuts are in
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