A German Corporate & Investment Bank Is Already Using AI To Replace Employees

When you think artificial intelligence (AI), you’ll imagine Star Trek, Star Wars and I, Robot.

A fictional concept that doesn’t exactly seem real, much less take over the world for real.

Despite how people are talking about them stealing our jobs, it’s never been really internalised.

But it is real and it has already started taking over the real world. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Deutsche Bank Announces Reduction In Manpower

Back in July 2019, Deutsche Bank announced its intention to cut 18,000 jobs by the year 2022.

The reason? They need to undergo a major restructuring, an overhaul that is estimated to cost the bank €315 million (~S$474 million).

Which is understandable given how they’re not having a great year. They posted their net revenues on Oct 2019, which has fallen by 15%

Till date, the bank has eliminated 4,700 jobs from the organisation.

But wait, are they down-sizing? Is this a cost-cutting measure?

It is, except not in the way you’d imagine.

Using Robots To Replace Humans

In a bold strategy called Operations 4.0, the bank is looking to automate a huge bulk of its back-office over the next three years.

Mark Matthews, head of operations for Deutsche’s corporate and investment bank, told the media that results are pretty promising.

The machine learning tools they’ve implemented helped to:

• Save 680,000 hours of manual work
• Process 5 million transactions in the corporate bank
• Perform 3.4 million checks within its investment banks

In other words, the bank will, in the future, operate at full strength at the fraction of its cost.

Scary, eh?

Robots Taking Over Is Coming Soon

If you’ve not noticed, the Singapore government has been trying to get its people to upgrade their skills insistently.

They’ve even come up with Industry Transformation Maps (ITMs) that maps out an industry, predict the disruptions and try to get the people ready for it.

For example, driverless buses and the various efforts to train bus captains up into certified-safety drivers.

Bus drivers aren’t the only casualties of the era of automation. Nor are blue-collar workers the only ones at risk.

Even bank positions, jobs which we think are “almost iron rice bowls” aren’t as safe as we thought.

Here are 10 other jobs which we think are at risk of getting replaced by 2028. Are you working in any of them?