Employees at Singapore’s biggest bank are set to lose their jobs to the AI revolution — and that worries me

• Job cuts at DBS will take the form of “natural attrition [...] over the next few years” as temporary and contract workers are not rehired
• Permanent staff will not lose their roles
• 1,000 new jobs are expected to be created

Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, has confirmed it will continue using AI tools by cutting as many as 4,000 roles (9.7% of DBS’ total workforce), so the technology can take a larger role in its operations.

A DBS spokesperson told BBC News, “reduction in workforce will come from natural attrition as temporary and contract roles roll off over the next few years."

The spokesperson did not confirm which roles will be affected, or strictly how many will be cut in Singapore alone, but it’s understood that permanent roles won’t be affected. As a silver lining, CEO Piyush Gupta, who is set to leave the company in March 2025, said the bank expects to create around 1,000 jobs built around working with AI.

DBS’ AI model workforce and the future of work

In 2024, Gupta said DBS’ AI push had been ongoing for at least a decade, and it now deploys, “over 800 AI models across 350 use cases, and expect the measured economic impact of these to exceed S$1bn ($745m USD, or £592m) in 2025."

Experts are mixed on whether machine-learned large language models (LLMS — what ‘artificial intelligence' has largely come to mean to the layperson) will drastically change the state of employment and the way we live our lives. In 2024, the IMF's managing director Kristalina Georgieva estimated AI technology would come to affect 40% of jobs worldwide and “likely worsen inequality.”

However, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England (BoE) also told the BBC in 2024 he thought that AI wouldn’t be a “mass destroyer of jobs”, but that “there is great potential with it. In case you missed it, vast swathes of artists might want a word with him.

For me, It’s not entirely clear whether an AI-led ‘human skills revolution’ is on the way.

On Valentine’s Day, I reported on, amongst other things, survey findings from antivirus software from Norton that found 62% of respondents wouldn’t be able to spot AI content in an online dating profile. If they can’t spot or understand the technology, they won’t grow with it at work, and that will make them seem even more expendable to executives — who you never hear about being replaced with AI, oddly enough.

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