ANZ's CEO joins other executives warning about the risks of AI
ANZ Bank chief executive officer Nuno Matos did not rule out the possibility of widespread job cuts because of artificial intelligence, as he joined the list of executives warning about the risks stemming from the technology.
Matos, during the Australian Financial Review Asia Summit on Tuesday, said "nobody knows" for certain about the impact of AI on jobs.
"I don't know and I think whoever says something that is certain will lie to you - you don't know," Matos said as quoted by Bloomberg. "Nobody knows."
Matos made the remarks amid recent job cuts from other Australian banks. It has been reported that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia cut hundreds of contractor roles after deploying AI across its customer chat service.
Overseas, the London-headquartered Standard Chartered also announced this year that it will cut approximately 7,800 back-office roles by 2030, equivalent to more than 15% of its support functions globally.
ANZ, which has around 40,000 staff, has yet to unveil similar AI-driven cuts. But it announced last year that it will lay off approximately 3,500 employees by September 2026 in a bid to "simplify the bank."
"As we continue our strategic review, we are eliminating duplication and complexity, stopping work that doesn't support our priorities and sharpening our focus on improving our non-financial risk management practices across the bank," Matos said last year.
Warning about rapid AI development
The possibility of job cuts is just one of the possible risks emerging from the rapid development of AI globally, a pace that industry leaders are asking to slow down.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have all issued warnings about the speed of AI development.
Amodei, in an essay published last week, warned that AI brings "serious" risks due to it being a powerful technology.
"They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute," he warned.
Matos, during the AFR Asia Summit, agreed that AI is "creating risks at much higher pace than what their own builders and developers were thinking."
"The fact that you see Musk, Dario, and Sam saying that they think they have to pull down the pace, it should tell us something very clear," the ANZ CEO said as quoted by Bloomberg.
"They are saying that the risk of this technology is well above what they expected."
He acknowledged that while AI can improve lives, it can also attack infrastructure without "enough guardrails and limitations."
Matos's warning follows recent reports of AI agents that went rogue and attacked other firms, including an OpenAI incident where its AI models autonomously escaped a controlled testing environment and successfully hacked into Hugging Face.
