Hundreds of call centre jobs supporting Commonwealth Bank customers have vanished in Johannesburg, and the bank’s AI chatbot is the reason. According to Bloomberg reporting this week, the affected workers were employed by Nutun, a South African outsourcing firm contracted to run CBA’s online chat support, and their work steadily dried up as the bank’s generative AI took over conversations and CBA wound back the contract. One estimate cited by Bloomberg puts the savings at tens of millions of dollars a year.
The numbers behind the decision explain why it happened. The bank’s generative AI chatbot, launched in late 2024 and built with Microsoft, was by May 2026 resolving nearly nine in every ten customer conversations without a human stepping in, and it now handles more than two million interactions a month across voice and messaging channels, according to figures reported by ACS Information Age. A CBA spokesperson told Bloomberg the bank has hired more than 140 people across its Australian contact centre operations since the start of 2026.
That defence matters, because the offshore cuts are landing in the middle of a bruising domestic fight over where CBA’s jobs are going. The Finance Sector Union says the bank has cut nearly 800 roles across 2026, and it doesn’t accept that the chatbot’s success story and the redundancy story are separate things.
The union sees a pattern, not progress
In early July, CBA announced another 276 redundancies, 176 of them in technology and engineering, with the rest spread across operations, business banking, institutional banking, human resources and retail banking, according to the FSU and ACS Information Age. The union has lodged a formal dispute at the Fair Work Commission and alleges that roles with similar titles and functions to the redundant ones were soon advertised through CBA India, the bank’s Indian subsidiary, which Information Age reports has grown from around 3,000 staff in 2022 to roughly 7,000 by mid 2025.
FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano didn’t soften the accusation. “This outrage is just management’s latest attempt to make CBA an Australian bank in name only,” she said in the union’s statement, which also pointed to the bank’s $5.44 billion half-year cash profit, up six per cent. CBA rejects the offshoring claim outright. “The roles currently advertised in India are separate and unrelated to the proposed changes in Australia,” a spokesperson told Information Age.
The union’s scepticism has history behind it. In 2025, CBA announced 45 onshore customer service redundancies tied to the same AI platform, then reversed the decision within weeks after the FSU took the case to the Fair Work Commission. The bank’s admission was unusually blunt: “CBA’s initial assessment that the 45 roles in our Customer Service Direct business were not required did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations and this error meant the roles were not redundant.” Angrisano said at the time that CBA had “been caught out trying to dress up job cuts as innovation”. A bank that cut 45 roles in error is asking for a lot of trust when it insists the next 276 are unavoidable.
Call centre jobs are disappearing on both sides of the ocean
For South Africa, the Nutun cuts sting in a different way. Business process outsourcing has been one of the country’s few reliable sources of entry-level employment, a first rung into the formal economy for young workers in a nation with one of the world’s highest unemployment rates. News24 reported the Johannesburg job losses under a stark framing: AI’s decimation of call centre jobs has begun. PwC’s South African analysis of its 2026 AI Jobs Barometer offers the flip side, finding the share of local job postings requiring AI skills nearly doubled this year to three per cent, a signal that the work replacing routine call centre jobs demands skills most displaced agents don’t yet have.
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CBA is not an outlier so much as an early mover in a queue. Bloomberg reports Microsoft has trimmed its customer service workforce from roughly 50,000 to about 40,000 in recent years, with commercial chief Judson Althoff boasting, “If something happened with little Johnny’s Xbox in the middle of the night, we can now solve that with AI.” Closer to home, ANZ cut around 3,500 roles last year, and this week Visa announced it would shed about 2,600 people, roughly seven per cent of its workforce. Forrester analysts expect almost half of US customer service roles to be affected by 2030, per Bloomberg, with offshore hubs like the Philippines facing the steepest losses.
What happens next will be decided in two places. At the Fair Work Commission, the FSU’s dispute over the July redundancies will test whether CBA can substantiate the business case it failed to make in 2025. Inside the bank, newly appointed chief AI officer Ranil Boteju and the $90 million Future Workforce Program announced by chief executive Matt Comyn in May are meant to prove that reskilling can keep pace with automation. The chatbot has already shown it can absorb the routine work of call centre jobs faster than anyone expected. Whether CBA can move the people it displaces into new work at the same speed is the harder experiment, and the one every other Australian employer is watching.
