Deutsche Bank CEO suggests robots could replace half the company's 97,000 employees
Deutsche Bank CEO suggests robots could replace half the
company's 97,000 employees
By Abigail Hess November 9, 2017
Some very smart people say that robots are going to steal
your job.
Researchers at Oxford University estimate that 47 percent
of U.S. jobs could be replaced by robots, automated technology and automated
intelligence (AI) within the next 20 years. Jeff Hesse, PwC principal and U.S.
people and organization co-leader, tells CNBC Make It, "The displacement
is already beginning to happen."
Elon Musk told the National Governors Association,
"There certainly will be job disruption. Because what's going to happen is
robots will be able to do everything better than us." Musk even went so
far as to say that "AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization."
John Cryan, the millionaire CEO of Deutsche Bank, is the
latest industry leader to suggest that technology will lead to significant
layoffs — and possibly sooner than we think.
"We employ 97,000 people," Cryan told the
Financial Times. "Most big peers have more like half that number."
"We're too manual, which can make you error-prone
and it makes you inefficient," he said. "There's a lot of machine
learning and mechanization that we can do."
He isn't just speculating. In late 2015, Deutsche Bank
announced that it planned to eliminate 9,000 employees as a part of a five-year
restructuring plan. So far, 4,000 jobs have been cut. Technology, says Cryan,
will allow for Deutsche to complete these cuts and more.
When asked about the specific number of employees at risk
of being replaced, he told Laura Noonan at the Financial Times it would be a
"big number."
In September, Cryan told the Financial Times that many
Deutsche accountants, for instance, could be replaced by simple technology.
They "spend a lot of the time basically being an abacus," he said.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have urged people not to
panic over increased reliance on AI technology, saying that fears about robots
putting people out of work are overstated.
But Cryan believes entire industries will be able to
replace workers with robots, not just Deutsche Bank. "We have to find new
ways of employing people and maybe people need to find new ways of spending
their time," he said. "The truthful answer is we won't need as many
people."
He says one reason for Deutsche's shift away from human
labor is that consumer banking has moved online, removing the need for many
brick-and-mortar branches.
"The truth is if I went to a load of branches, I'd
wait quite a lot of the day before I encountered [any] customers," he
says. "They just don't come in as often as they used to."
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