HSBC is said to be looking at 20,000 roles sacrificed to AI. The group strategy may provide some clues...

Is banking giant HSBC set to become the next ‘victim’ of AI’s job-slaying impact? That’s certainly the headline that has dominated the mainstream media over the past week or so after CEO George Elhedery appears to have suggested that as many as 20,000 roles, around 10% of the current workforce, could fall to being replaced by AI.

There’s been no official confirmation of this from HSBC, but scuttlebutt suggests that any headcount reduction would impact non-client facing roles in global service centers the most. Since taking over as CEO in 2024, Elhedery has cut thousands of jobs as part of an ongoing re-structuring push, so he has form here.

And HSBC would hardly be the first banking giant to take an AI axe to its headcount. Last November, the CEO of Dutch institution ABN AMRO slashed a quarter of its workforce total, boasting that her organization should be recognized as an AI leader.

Thinking

What happens at HSBC is yet to be seen. During the latest financial analyst update at the end of last month, Elhedery did talk about the group’s AI strategy, emphasizing its use to “empower our colleagues”. He said:

If you ask me where is the biggest investment going into the new technology today, it is definitely going into generative AI…we're making generative AI available to all our colleagues in time, 85% mostly now enabled to make sure that we are helping our colleagues upgrade themselves and become future-ready. 

The first thinking is how can we bring our whole colleague population with us in becoming future-ready, generative AI enabled. They will have generative AI tools that they can use. They will have coding assistance or vibe coding assistance for those among our engineers, 31,000 already enabled, and we are seeing immediate productivity gains. We're seeing 60% speeding up in our unit testing. We're seeing 5x faster patching of code, patching of vulnerabilities and code, thanks to all these capabilities. This is our first mission. All our colleagues to benefit, to be trained, to be upskilled, to become future-ready, better version of themselves, more productive, better outcome for our customers. 

He also played up the human intelligence aspect of how to enhance servicing clients, arguing, saying the bank is looking at how gen AI can enhance customer experience at various touch points:

This is our relationship managers, wealth advisers, contact center operators. As they engage with customers, generative AI tools already rolled out will allow them to personalize at scale, to tailor-make, to customize at scale at the highest possible standards for our customers close to real time, in a way that can allow us to deliver our capabilities to customers in a much more seamless, faster, better way. Customer experience will be materially enhanced.

But he hinted at a reduced role/need for humans when he added: 

Now today, we will have operators using this generative AI at the service of our customers, but you can envisage that in a few years' time, we could possibly put these generative AI tools straight for utilization by our customers. 

Costs

Group CFO Manveen Kaur provided some further insight on HSBC thinking at the recent Morgan Stanley European Financials Conference 2026, stating: 

For us, the first starting point of AI is to increase the productivity of your colleagues. For that, we have deployed a productivity suite with more than 80% take-up in terms of people who regularly use it. That is all about opening the minds of our colleagues to new ways of doing business because that will have an impact not just today, but your ability to embrace change as we see a changing landscape over the next few years.

HSBC is conscious of the importance of that customer experience, she insisted:

You’re always mindful of the customer journeys, in particular, some of the new providers may be offering. So you need to be absolutely top of the game in terms of the technology, online banking as well as applications and product offerings you have. We never sit on our laurels and the inherent advantages we have for the trust that we have taken hundreds of years, 160 to be precise, to build in terms of our customer loyalty, but we want to continue to be - and will be - competitive for the customer journeys we offer because the landscape around us, in terms of competition as well as the demographics changing [in] our client base, requires us to do so.

There is, of course, she admitted, a financial element to all the AI strategizing:

We consider that both in terms of revenue and cost, AI is beneficial. Most people will talk only of cost synergies. For revenue, we do actually track it to say, ‘If for growth in revenue, you needed x number of additional headcount in a pre-AI world, in a post-AI world as deployment gets deeper, what would that number be?’.

And she added:

Hopefully, it's going to be significantly smaller.

My take

Time will tell whether there is to be an AI-enabled bloodbath at HSBC. If I were a betting man, I know which way I think the odds are stacked, but let’s see what comes out.

In the meantime, it is encouraging to both CEO and CFO acknowledge the importance of the CX in the client banking journey. As my own meltdown around Metro Bank a couple of weeks ago reflected, the loss of trust and the fragility of that institution/customer relationship is easily damaged beyond repair, and that’s one of the dangers across all business sectors that the AI allure of chasing cost savings carries in its wake.

Onwards!