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Australian bank rehires workers replaced by AI after "lying" about chatbot success [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2025-08-22

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia must rehire 45 workers it fired and replaced with an AI chatbot. A financial services union there describes the result as a "massive win" and a warning about misuse of the technology. The bank had announced that its new AI chatbot had reduced call volumes by 2,000 a week, allowing it to make the workers redundant, but this turned out to be untrue: "an outright lie," said the workers.

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.

The CBA admitted the roles were not redundant once brought to a tribunal, and it has apologized to those it fired. They can return to their jobs or accept exit payments. "We have apologized to the employees concerned and acknowledge we should have been more thorough in our assessment of the roles required," CBA's spokesperson told Bloomberg.

"AI" typically refers to chatbots and image generators built using large language models and is reportedly a multi-trillion dollar industry. However, people have been recently looking closely at the portion the economy actually accounted for by the creative roles it can replace–mall caricaturists, furry porn artists, the editorial staff at national magazines, etc.,–and it's just not adding up.

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