British trade unions want the country's banks to be better equipped to retain workers displaced by artificial intelligence.
At next month's UK Trades Union Congress, labour groups will call on lenders, insurers and accountancy firms to prepare to help millions of workers who may lose their jobs to AI, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday (August 27).
The Accord trade union, which represents bank workers, plans to urge the industry to fund a “massive” program to retrain many of the roughly 2.5 million workers when the labor movement holds its annual conference in September, according to the report. The group pointed to a Citigroup report that warned half of jobs in the banking sector are threatened by automation.
“Parliament is concerned that the June 2024 report states that up to 54% of banking jobs and 48% of insurance jobs could be replaced by AI in future,” the Accord motion, posted on the TUC's website, said in the report. “Job replacement by AI is predicted to be higher in financial services than any other area of the economy.”
As PYMNTS reported at the time Citi's study was released, the banking giant argued that the shift to a “bot-driven world” raises issues related to compliance, security, regulation and ethics.
“Because AI models are known to hallucinate and invent information that does not exist, organisations run the risk that AI chatbots could become fully autonomous, with negative financial and reputational impacts on their companies,” Citi said.
Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unity, one of the world's largest trade unions, said England was “lagging behind” and needed to support “new technologies”, according to a report in the Financial Times.
AI has already played a role in some layoffs, with companies such as Intuit, maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, announcing last month that it would cut 1,800 jobs as part of a new focus on AI.
But rather than replacing these employees with AI bots, Intuit plans to hire an equal number of employees with AI expertise.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS interviewed Javed Khan, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration, in April, who said, “We are already seeing the benefits that AI will bring to the workplace and beyond, empowering all of us to rethink how we connect and collaborate.”
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