1 hour ago
By Richard Henderson
ANZ Group Holdings Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Nuno Matos warned about unpredictable risks linked to artificial intelligence and declined to rule out large-scale job cuts at the bank as it adopts the quickly evolving technology.
“At this point in time, it’s creating risks at a much higher pace than what their own builders and developers were thinking,” Matos said at the Australian Financial Review Asia Summit on Tuesday in Sydney.
“The fact that you see Musk, Dario and Sam saying that they think they have to pull down the pace, it should tell us something very clear,” he said, referring to Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic PBC, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. The three AI leaders have in the past few days warned about the risks of rapid AI development and even floated a slowing of the pace of model development, drawing a rebuke from President Donald Trump.
“They are saying that the risk of this technology is well above what they expected,” Matos said.
“We all had this dream that AI would come to improve our lives, increase our capacities and capabilities, find cures to many diseases — and that’s true,” he said. But without “enough guardrails and limitations,” it will also lead to dangerous outcomes, he said. “It’ll attack infrastructure,” Matos said.
The bank boss warned about the potentially destabilizing impact of AI adoption on society should mass job losses emerge, and didn’t rule out the possibility of sweeping cuts at ANZ due to AI. Melbourne-based ANZ has around 40,000 staff.
“I don’t know and I think whoever says something that is certain will lie to you — you don’t know,” said Matos. “Nobody knows.”
Rival lender Westpac Banking Corp. on Tuesday made its own case for AI, telling investors that the technology is returning time to its workers.
Five agents operating across mortgages and consumer finance are estimated to remove 250,000 manual activities and free up about 150,000 hours of banker capacity a year, according to a presentation by Andrew McMullan, Westpac’s chief data, digital and AI officer. The bank put the annual benefit at roughly 100,000 hours from automating payslip and bank statement checks in home loans and about 50,000 hours in consumer finance. Westpac described the figures as estimates of annual benefit.
