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,” Ms Sullivan said on Wednesday at the bank’s annual general meeting at The Gabba in Brisbane.
“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,” she said.
The 63-year-old said she was made redundant after 25 years with the bank, which is Australia’s most valuable public company, including spending 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,” chairman Paul O’Malley said, acknowledging how difficult the process had been for Ms 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.
“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,” he said.
The bank posted a record profit of $10.1 billion in the year to June 30, a figure Mr Comyn previously said could have been higher if it had better leveraged the possibilities from AI.
Mr O’Malley also defended the bank’s use of offshore workers in India in response to another question, saying the country was home to an incredible pool of talent and the company needed to adapt to the times.
“There’s been a dramatic shift in how customers engage with us and how we have to engage with customers,” he said.
“Fifteen years ago … we didn’t do everything on our phones.”
When customers once engaged with the bank in branches during traditional opening hours, they now expected staff to be available around the clock, Mr 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.”
Mr Comyn said that CBA had just over 6800 employees in India, including 3000 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 sent a rotating group of about 200 Australian staff each year to increase their skills, while it had also partnered with Griffith University and the University of South Australia to develop local skills.
Australian Associated Press is the beating heart of Australian news. AAP is Australia’s only independent national newswire and has been delivering accurate, reliable and fast news content to the media industry, government and corporate sector for 85 years. We keep Australia informed.
