Since the dawn of ChatGPT in late 2022, tech evangelists have said that artificial intelligence would only augment, not replace, human labor. Recent corporate developments so far this year have called that proposition into question.
U.K.-based bank HSBC may soon become the latest company to slash its workforce in favor of artificial intelligence tools. Citing anonymous sources “familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg reported this week that the bank is considering culling as much as 10% of its workforce, or roughly 20,000 people. The move comes amid the bank’s bets on “AI to shrink its middle and back offices,” the news outlet reported.
Sources told Bloomberg that “non-client facing roles in global service centers” would be among the positions most impacted by the cuts.
As of Dec. 31, 2025, the company employed about 210,000 people in total, according to the company’s latest annual filing from February.
An HSBC spokesperson declined to comment on emailed questions about Bloomberg’s report.
News about HSBC’s potential AI-related layoffs came just one day after CFO Pam Kaur spoke at a Morgan Stanley conference about her focus on “staff-related inflation.” Though she didn’t mention layoffs, she said that the company was looking into the “benefits we can get through AI, whether it’s on better productivity around the revenue line or just the cost benefit.”
In HSBC’s 2025 annual report issued in February, the company noted that it had 100 generative AI solutions in use and a “strong pipeline of use cases in development.” Still, the company maintained that its adoption of AI was “underpinned by our people, and we continue to invest in training and tooling to support staff in their roles.”
“Around the globe, around 85% of our colleagues have access to our large language model-based productivity tool, HSBC Productivity Suite, which helps them to analyze and translate documents, summarize information and generate insights,” the annual report stated. “While the progress this year has been significant, the opportunity ahead is far greater. … Through 2026, we intend to expand enterprise-wide adoption of AI tools and strive to embed AI deeper into our core processes.”
If HSBC does indeed go through with the AI-driven cuts, it certainly wouldn’t be the first or likely the last to do so. In perhaps one of the clearest cases of job cuts tied to AI this year, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said he would trim as much as 40% of his workforce and painted the decision as an inevitability every other business would soon wake up to. It’s worth noting, though, that some analysts have questioned Dorsey’s true motivations for the layoffs.
Meanwhile, AI was cited in about 8% of U.S. job cuts in the months of January and February, according to research by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
