Commonwealth Bank of Australia rehired 45 workers after the bank declared their roles redundant following deployment of an AI-powered voice bot. The Finance Sector Union escalated the dispute to a fair work tribunal, alleging CBA falsely claimed the chatbot cut call volumes by 2,000 calls weekly while call volumes were increasing. Fired employees reported management offering overtime and redirecting managers to answer phones during rising call demand. The union alleged simultaneous hiring for similar roles in India, suggesting possible outsourcing. CBA later admitted an error in assessing redundancy and confirmed the roles were not redundant.
The FSU noted that some of these workers had been with CBA for decades. Those workers in particular were shocked when CBA announced last month that their jobs had become redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said.
But "this was an outright lie," fired workers told FSU. Instead, call volumes had been increasing at the time they were dismissed, with CBA supposedly "scrambling"-offering staff overtime and redirecting management to join workers answering phones to keep up.
To uncover the truth, FSU escalated the dispute to a fair work tribunal, where the union accused CBA of failing to explain how workers' roles were ruled redundant. The union also alleged that CBA was hiring for similar roles in India, Bloomberg noted, which made it appear that CBA had perhaps used the chatbot to cover up a shady pivot to outsource jobs.
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