ANZ Group Holdings chief executive Nuno Matos declined to rule out large-scale job cuts driven by artificial intelligence at the Australian Financial Review Asia Summit in Sydney on 15 September. “Nobody knows” what AI will do to jobs, he said, HCAMag reported. The bank has around 40,000 staff, Investing.com reported.
A year earlier, at the same summit, Matos announced that ANZ would cut 3,500 jobs and about 1,000 contractor roles. “I hate to do this but it’s for the future of the company,” he said at the time, Insurance Business reported.
The weekend that prompted the warning
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay on 12 September urging AI companies to “pace the frontier,” and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk endorsed it, Quartz reported. President Donald Trump rejected the call the next day, arguing a slowdown would erode the US lead over China, the publication reported.
The 3,800-word essay said development of the most advanced systems had to slow to keep AI from slipping beyond human control, Bloomberg reported, and the proposal set off a selloff in technology stocks. Altman said OpenAI would delay going public this year on safety grounds, MS NOW reported.
China’s Foreign Ministry called the warnings fear mongering, Quartz reported, citing CNBC. Trump wrote on Truth Social that fears of AI destroying humanity were a “HOAX,” CNN reported.
What Matos told the summit
Matos said AI was “creating risks at a much higher pace” than its own developers had expected, Bloomberg reported. He said Musk, Amodei and Altman were signalling that the technology’s risk was well above what they had anticipated, according to Investing.com.
AI without adequate safeguards and limits would produce dangerous outcomes, Matos said, and could be turned against infrastructure, Investing.com reported.
Matos was asked about a warning from Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger that there was a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within a decade, AAP reported.
“AI is a reality. No more debate,” Matos told the audience, according to AAP. He said workers who refused to adopt AI would lose their jobs to people who did, and that a world in which everyone lost their job was possible.
Asked whether ANZ’s roughly 9,000 employees in India would be disrupted, Matos said nobody knew, AAP reported. That workforce equals about 22.5% of ANZ’s 40,000 staff.
He refused to put a number on cuts, saying “whoever says something that is certain will lie to you,” Investing.com reported.
Mass job losses could destabilise society, he warned, according to Investing.com. People are not made to stay at home, he said, AAP reported.
A protester rushed the stage during his session and was tackled by security, according to AAP. Matos told the audience it was part of the job.
ANZ’s workforce a year on
ANZ employed about 43,000 people when it announced the 3,500 cuts in September 2025, Reuters reported at the time. Investing.com now puts the workforce at around 40,000.
The cuts carried a restructuring charge of A$560 million and were due to be completed by September 2026, Reuters reported. ANZ said customer-facing roles and jobs tied to its Suncorp Bank acquisition would largely be spared.
Matos warned then of more “ugly” changes, Business Recorder reported, carrying Reuters copy. Finance Sector Union president Wendy Streets said ANZ could not say who would do the work of the departing staff, beyond saying the work would stop.
Ord Minnett called the 2025 restructure positive and said it could put the smallest of the big four banks on a path to a valuation rerating if executed. The broker raised its price target to A$30 from A$27.50, according to its research note.
ANZ has not said whether the 3,500 reductions are complete. HCAMag reported that ANZ has yet to announce AI-driven cuts of the kind made at other Australian banks.
Where ANZ is putting AI
ANZ hired its first chief data and AI officer, Kai Yang, from HSBC, with Yang due to join in Sydney in July, Bloomberg reported in April.
The bank has rolled out agentic AI tools in the customer relationship management system used by its business bankers, Matos told investors at the May 2026 half-year results. In the same briefing, he committed to increasing ANZ’s business banker numbers by close to 50% by 2030.
Those tools run on Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, which ANZ said it was the first in Asia-Pacific to deploy at scale, Computer Weekly reported in February.
What other banks have done
Commonwealth Bank of Australia cut hundreds of contractor roles at a Johannesburg call centre after deploying AI across its customer chat service, HCAMag reported in July. The Finance Sector Union has counted around 800 CBA roles cut over the past year, Information Age reported.
CBA is making nearly 200 more technology workers redundant, Information Age reported in late September, and the union called the cuts savage. CBA chief executive Matt Comyn wrote in May that AI-driven workforce transitions must be handled with care, according to HCAMag.
Westpac has put five AI agents into its home loan and credit card processing, saving more than 150,000 hours, its chief data, digital and AI officer Andrew McMullan said in August, Cyber Daily reported. Westpac said the time would be reinvested in customer service.
Digital servicing has cut Westpac’s cost to serve by 65%, consumer division data and AI general manager Luis Uguina said, Cyber Daily reported in June.
Globally, a Bloomberg Intelligence report in 2025 estimated banks could cut up to 200,000 jobs within three to five years as AI takes over tasks, Staffing Industry Analysts reported.
The Pacific exposure
ANZ operates in nine Pacific markets, including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu, according to the bank. Its team in Suva provides operational support for ANZ Fiji and the other Pacific countries, former chief executive Shayne Elliott wrote in 2024. ANZ reports full-year results on 9 November, according to NZX, covering the year in which its 3,500 job cuts were due to be completed. ANZ has not disclosed how AI will affect its Pacific operations.
