Financial institution Fires Employees in Favor of AI Chatbot, Rehires Them After Chatbot Is Horrible on the Job

Corporations everywhere in the world are at the moment racing to shrink their workforces and exchange them with AI. Usually, it appears, this isn’t figuring out for the companies concerned. Working example: A financial institution in Australia just lately did so, however then needed to ask its staff to come back again after it turned out that the chatbot that it had launched to exchange them couldn’t lower the mustard.

Final month, the Commonwealth Financial institution of Australia introduced that it will be shedding 45 customer support staff because it rolled out a brand new AI-powered ‘voice bot’ that might supposedly do their job, Bloomberg reports. The financial institution claimed that the chatbot decreased the financial institution’s name quantity considerably. Nonetheless, the employees’ union acquired concerned and says it has decided that wasn’t the result.

Australia’s Finance Sector Union, which represents staff within the banking business, referred to as BS on the financial institution’s claims and engaged CBA in a office relations tribunal. Now, it seems that the financial institution has admitted it made a grievous mistake, telling Bloomberg that its preliminary evaluation that the customer support reps had been now not wanted “didn’t adequately take into account all related enterprise concerns and this error meant the roles weren’t redundant.”

“We now have apologized to the staff involved and acknowledge we should always have been extra thorough in our evaluation of the roles required,” a financial institution spokesperson instructed the information outlet. The identical spokesperson mentioned that the fired staff had been being supplied a number of choices, together with persevering with of their outdated positions. Gizmodo reached out to CBA for extra data.

FSU put out a statement on Thursday, sharing particulars concerning the scenario. “CBA final month introduced the roles can be made redundant as a result of introduction of a brand new AI-powered ‘voice bot’, which they claimed had led to a discount in name volumes. Members instructed us this was an outright lie and didn’t mirror the fact of what was occurring in Direct Banking,” FSU writes. “Name volumes had been in actual fact growing and CBA was scrambling to handle the scenario by providing workers additional time and directing Staff Leaders to reply calls.”

“Getting CBA to rescind these job cuts is an enormous win – however the injury has already been finished for our 45 colleagues who’ve needed to endure the stress and fear of dealing with redundancy, a few of whom have been with the financial institution for many years and had been abruptly confronted with the prospect of being unable to pay their payments,” the union added.

Whereas the particulars of this entire episode aren’t available, it actually looks like yet one more instance of an organization placing the cart earlier than the horse with AI. In the end, AI continues to be an experimental expertise, and its outcomes are hit and miss. A much-publicized MIT examine recently claimed that 95 % of AI pilot applications at corporations have, up to now, been failures. With numbers like that, corporations can be smart to maintain their headcount excessive in the meanwhile.