Singapore’s biggest financial institution, Development Bank (DBS), has formalized plans to cut about 4,000 of its contract and temporary staff workforce over the next three years as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on roles carried out by humans.
The layoff aims to slash operational costs by at least 15% and boost efficiency by streamlining processes while allowing the bank to invest more in digital transformation and customer-facing services.
DBS Chief Executive Officer Piyush Gupta stated that the bank’s move is to trim its workforce following further adoption of AI across its business.
Speaking during a press conference on Tuesday, Gupta disclosed that following the shrinking of the workforce by 10%, the bank expects to create around 1,000 new AI-related jobs. “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. This time I’m struggling to say how will I repurpose people to create jobs,” Gupta added.
DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest lender, employs a total of around 41,000 people and currently has between 8,000 and 9,000 temporary and contract workers.
Last year, the outgoing CEO, who will be replaced by Current Deputy Chief Executive Tan Su Shan at the end of March, said the financial institute 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 ($745m; £592m) in 2025,” he added.
The ongoing proliferation of AI technology has put its benefits and risks under the spotlight, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) saying in 2024 that it is set to affect nearly 40% of all jobs worldwide. The IMF’s Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said that “in most scenarios, AI will likely worsen overall inequality.”
However, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, sees this differently, stating that AI will not be a “mass destroyer of jobs” and human workers will learn to work with new technologies.
