What They Did
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is Australia's largest bank, with about 49,000 employees and more than 17 million customers. Like most big banks, it ran its customer chat and phone support through a mix of in-house staff and offshore contractors.
How LLMs Killed Them
In late 2024 CBA launched Hey CommBank, which it called Australia's first generative AI banking chatbot. By May 2026 the bank said its chat platform was "wrapping up nearly nine in ten customer conversations without any agent input," and it was handling more than 2 million conversations a month across voice and messaging. The humans went next. In late July 2026, Bloomberg reported that CBA had cut hundreds of chat-support workers, many of them contractors at a Johannesburg call centre run by South African outsourcer Nutun, as the bank scaled back the contract. Staff said automation had been steadily taking over their work, and one insider estimated the change would save the bank tens of millions of dollars a year. The same month CBA made 276 redundancies across technology, operations, and HR, and the Finance Sector Union counted close to 800 roles cut in 2026, most of them in technology. The union took a dispute to the Fair Work Commission, arguing the bank had "no financial justification" for the cuts after a A$5.44 billion half-year profit. This happened a year after CBA's first attempt to replace call centre staff with AI went badly: in August 2025 it cut 45 customer service roles because of a voice bot, then reversed the decision and apologised for an "error" when call volumes rose. The second attempt, aimed at offshore contractors, drew far less public attention.
Timeline
- Late 2024: Launched Hey CommBank, a generative AI chatbot for customer support.
- July–August 2025: Cut 45 customer service roles after deploying an AI voice bot, then reversed the decision and apologised when call volumes rose.
- 2026: Appointed a chief AI officer and set up a A$90M Future Workforce Program for reskilling and exits.
- February–July 2026: Rolling technology cuts of about 300, 119, and 170 roles.
- May 2026: The chat platform was resolving nearly 9 in 10 conversations without a human.
- Late July 2026: Hundreds of offshore chat-support contractors cut as AI took over their work; union lodges a Fair Work dispute.
By the Numbers
- Chatbot resolves nearly 9 in 10 chat conversations with no human involved
- 2M+ customer conversations a month handled by the AI platform
- Hundreds of offshore contract chat agents cut in July 2026
- About 800 roles cut in 2026, by the Finance Sector Union's count
- A$5.44B half-year net profit, up 6%, in the same year