The CEO of British telecom giant BT warns AI could lead to further job cuts at the firm
Executives warning of the potential impact of artificial intelligence on white-collar jobs is becoming an increasingly familiar tale.
The latest is Allison Kirkby, the CEO of British telecommunications giant BT. In an interview with the Financial Times published Sunday, Kirkby said that advancements in AI technology could lead to further cuts at the firm.
BT announced in 2023 plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs by 2030 as part of a push to reduce its cost base by the end of the decade.
But Kirkby told the FT that this plan "did not reflect" AI's "full potential."
"Depending on what we learn from AI ... there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade," she said.
BT has turned to AI in recent years to reinvent processes in areas like customer service.
The company announced in 2024 that it was using generative AI to aid sales and support operations across BT and EE, its mobile network division. In December, the firm said that EE's virtual assistant, dubbed "Aimee," was handling up to 60,000 customer conversations a week.
BT is not alone in its attempts to automate such tasks. Swedish payments company Klarna has been open about its efforts to use AI to run its customer service desks.
In 2024, Klarna said its OpenAI-powered AI assistant was carrying out the work of 700 full-time customer service agents.
The firm's CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, has been a strong advocate of AI but has since softened his position on the tech, saying in May that certain cost-cutting efforts had gone too far and that Klarna was now recruiting for its customer service operation, Bloomberg reported.
But Siemiatkowski has remained confident that AI poses a major threat to white-collar jobs going forward.
Speaking on The Times Tech podcast earlier this month, Siemiatkowski said that the technology had played a major role in "efficiency gains" at Klarna and that its workforce had reduced from about 5,500 to 3,000 people in the last two years as a result.
"My suspicion again is that there will be an implication for white-collar jobs, and when that happens, that usually leads to at least a recession in the short term," he added. "Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid that, with what's happening from a technology perspective."
AI companies themselves have sounded the alarm that their product could significantly impact the job market.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.
"We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei told Axios in May. "I don't think this is on people's radar.
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