In late July 2025, Commonwealth Bank briefed the Finance Sector Union on another round of job changes. Forty-five roles in the bank’s call centres would go. The reason was new. CBA had introduced an AI voice bot to handle customer calls. According to the ABC, it was the first time a bank had told the union its job cuts were due to AI.
The union called an urgent meeting. “This is our worst fears come true,” it told members, counting 90 roles affected in the round as a whole.
On 29 July the bank confirmed the 45 cuts to the ABC. A spokesperson talked about redeployment and supporting staff “with care, dignity and respect,” and said CBA had hired more than 9,000 people in the past year. The bank also set out the logic: “By automating simple queries, our teams can focus on more complex customer queries that need empathy and experience.” According to the union, as reported by Bloomberg, CBA had said the bot cut call volumes by 2,000 a week.
On the phones in Direct Banking, the union said, staff were seeing something else. Its statement, quoted by the ABC: “Call volumes were rising, with management scrambling to offer overtime and even pulling team leaders onto the phones.”
The union asked for the numbers. CBA, it said, kept refusing to be transparent about call volumes, so in August it took the bank to the Fair Work Commission.
The two claims may not have been measuring the same thing. A bot can take calls off the queue while the queue itself keeps growing. The sources give no raw figures to compare, so there is no way to tell. Deciding whether 45 people were still needed would also have meant knowing how much work was still reaching people, and the union said the bank would not share its numbers.
On 21 August, four days before the next hearing, the bank reversed course. It told the ABC that the roles were not redundant after all, called the decision an “error,” and said it had apologised to the staff involved. CBA said it “did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations,” and added: “we should have been more thorough in our assessment of the roles required.”
The union’s version of the admission was more specific. Management, it said, had conceded they didn’t properly consider that an increase in calls would continue over a number of months. National secretary Julia Angrisano said CBA had been “caught out trying to dress up job cuts as innovation.” Some of the 45, the union noted, had been with the bank for decades.
A few weeks later, one of them told the Guardian what they had expected AI to bring to the job: “I expected [AI] would be helping you to do your job better, taking away some of the menial or time-consuming work, so that we can actually deliver better service.”
The apology came with a choice. The 45 could stay in their roles, look for redeployment inside the bank, or take the exit payment and leave anyway.