Friend or foe? The AI bloodletting has begun in Australia

As Scott Farquhar told the National Press Club, when asked about the 150 AI-induced job cuts at Atlassian’s call centres: “If you make call centres twice as productive, then you need half as many people.”

The Commonwealth Bank was not as glib about its recent call centre job losses which were also attributed to the introduction of AI to handle the most menial queries.

But if the Atlassian founder’s brutal calculation holds true, the thousands of employees still employed at that bank’s call centres – and at Telstra, which is also heavily embracing AI – have every reason to fear more bloodletting down the track.

Just to underline the bank’s position, CBA chief executive Matt Comyn announced a partnership with OpenAI this week – as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in extra spending to help bring advanced AI to customers and staff to deliver a “more personalised” service.

No doubt this includes more AI “chatbots” for handling inquiries from customers, like the ones which are already replacing call centre staff.

He made it clear that he intends to put the bank on the front foot when it comes to embracing AI and transforming the business.

“To be globally competitive, Australia must embrace this new era of rapid technological change,” Comyn said.

“Our strategic partnership with OpenAI reflects our commitment to bringing world-class capabilities to Australia, and exploring how AI can enhance customer experiences, better protect our customers and unlock new opportunities for Australian businesses.”

Telstra boss Vicki Brady, though less vocal on the company’s AI developments at this week’s results, was similarly forthright at its recent strategy day.

“We see lots of potential across those areas … customer engagement, how we operate and manage our network, how we develop software and manage our IT environment, how it supports back of office for us where you tend to have manual processes.”

While it sounds like a great opportunity for Australian business, it sounds rather alarming when viewed from the vantage of their employees.

After all, both are relatively low-growth businesses investing heavily in AI. Will this investment pay off by boosting worker productivity, or by replacing them?

“CBA publicly preaches productivity and innovation while quietly eroding local jobs. This hypocrisy cannot go unchallenged,” Finance Sector Union national secretary Julia Angrisano said after the bank’s record $10 billion profit this week.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions has demanded that employers guarantee workers’ job security before introducing artificial intelligence to protect against jobs carnage.

Local academics used research by the International Labour Organisation to translate its findings on AI job losses to Australia. They came up with a startling forecast of Australia’s AI future in 2050: 32 per cent of current jobs in Australia could be done by AI.

“But that doesn’t mean 32 per cent of people will lose their jobs overnight,” Victoria University academics Janine Dixon and James Lennox said in a report posted to The Conversation last week.

“It will take time for AI capabilities to be installed, giving people time to train for alternative careers. Much of the impact is likely to be years away.”

This time frame gives AI a lot of time to move beyond relatively low-level tasks, like replacing basic call centre work, to replacing white-collar jobs – like the software developers who make it.

So what does Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes think the impact will be of the AI transformation on the company he built alongside Farquhar? It is in a frenzy of AI upgrades of its own products and surely looking at the productivity benefits.

Cannon-Brookes sees a bright future despite AI’s coding adeptness. It appears that the famously prescient 2011 claim by US billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen that “software is eating the world” still holds.

“Do I think there will be far less developers in the world five years from now? No, I don’t think so,” Cannon-Brookes told investors on the company’s earnings conference call last week.

“And yes, we’re still hiring lots of engineers and developers with the growth of the business.”

Cannon-Brookes’ argument is simple: the world will need far more software and AI means it will be cheaper and easier to extend its development beyond corporate tech teams to the actual business itself.

“Whether they’re in finance or HR or marketing, there’s going to be a lot more people creating software,” he says.

Mind you, Atlassian has a lot riding on this version of the future. Its business is literally built on managing the workflows and projects for this sort of development.

The Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes fortunes will dwindle rapidly if this development can be done by an AI bot instead of teams of employees.

But even AI’s transformation of low-level customer work – such as call centres – is not necessarily seen as a bad thing for local jobs.

It could represent a boon for our country, says KPMG’s chief digital officer, John Munnelly.

“A lot of the stuff that AI is improving is the tasks we used to offshore, like call centre work,” he says.

“There’s a really great opportunity for the Australian economy with AI.”

KPMG chief digital officer John Munnelly

The productivity dividend that Farquhar mentioned could actually make a lot more of this work viable here.

“There’s a really great opportunity for the Australian economy with AI,” Munnelly says.

But the interesting stuff is already happening further up the wage chain – like KPMG’s new AI tax tool that allows its executives to vastly accelerate the delivery of first-draft advice to clients.

“What used to take us two weeks to go and prepare – if a client’s in the middle of a deal – now we can literally get it out the door in a day,” Munnelly says.

It was left to KPMG chief executive Andrew Yates to address the conundrum this poses. What will this KPMG employee do with the nine days that would have previously been spent on this work?

“I think our current hypothesis is that what we do will change. But AI and the technology we’ve got will generate so much more data that our work will change from collating that data to really assessing, analysing, presenting, interpreting much more data than is currently available,” he says.

“There will be a real need for that insight and technical understanding of all the data that’s produced.”

As for the analysts trying to make sense of the AI talk which is starting to creep into earnings season speeches and rising costs, there is a more prosaic question.

“Companies have been keen to point out their investments in AI, but when will we see it translate to the bottom line?” asked UBS strategist Richard Schellbach.

Even Comyn, who packed more than a dozen AI references into his introduction to the bank’s full-year results, came up with a cautious answer.

He foresees a more effective workforce, producing higher quality work with both revenue and cost-out opportunities. But he does not expect this to come easily.

“You can imagine that there are some much more efficient ways of delivering some of the things we currently do. But I do think that’s going to take some time, like some years to work through some of the accuracy and quality that’s required.”

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