Barclays said Thursday it will cut roughly 5,000 jobs — about 5% of its global workforce — as part of a modernisation push the bank says is increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, even as it reported higher quarterly profit than a year earlier.
The bank said 1,000 positions have already been eliminated, with a further 4,000 expected to go by the end of the year. The cuts are concentrated in Barclays' UK retail bank, though a significant share will fall on back-office roles based in India; roughly 60% of the reductions will hit support functions, including developer jobs.
'The icing on the cake, not the cake'
Barclays chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan said the job losses stem from heavy investment in technology meant to simplify the business, but was careful to frame AI as a complement to, rather than the driver of, the overhaul. "AI has an important role to play and may have a more important role to play in the future," he said. "We will employ the AI at scale. But AI is the icing on the cake, not the cake — because you need to do the infrastructure build to get the benefits of AI."
Not all the cuts are directly attributable to AI, the bank said, but their scale is likely to intensify scrutiny of the technology's effect on bank staffing; HSBC, Standard Chartered and Danske Bank have all flagged AI-related job cuts of their own this year. "It is a hot button topic," said AJ Bell investment analyst Russ Mould, though he noted lenders have yet to make sweeping moves toward AI given unresolved questions about security and customer service.
Sharon Graham, general secretary of the Unite union, was blunter, accusing Barclays of "using AI as an excuse to discard its loyal and long-suffering workforce" rather than retraining staff. Barclays reported £2.3 billion in quarterly profit, higher than a year earlier but slightly below forecasts, and said it expects the efficiency drive to deliver a further £1.1 billion in savings in 2027.