DBS Group plans to cut 4,000 jobs over the next three years as it expects artificial intelligence (AI) to increasingly take on roles carried out by humans, Chief Executive Officer Piyush Gupta said on Monday.
“My current projection in the next three years, we’ll shrink our workforce by about 4,000 or 10%,” Gupta said at an industry conference in Mumbai. The outgoing CEO, however, said 1,000 new positions will be added in AI.
Gupta is among the first major banking chiefs to lay out details of possible job losses due to AI.
“In my 15 years of being a CEO, for the first time, I’m struggling to create jobs. So far, I’ve always had a line of sight to what jobs I can create. This time I’m struggling to say how will I repurpose people to create jobs,” Gupta added.
The reduction in workforce will come from natural attrition as temp and contract roles roll off over the next few years, a spokesperson from DBS said in an emailed response to Reuters.
DBS CEO Piyush Gupta is set to be succeeded by Tan Su Shan on March 28 to lead Southeast Asia’s biggest bank.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Mumbai and Shivangi Lahiri in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
