Banking giant dismisses workers as "low-level human capital"

Banking giant Standard Chartered (StanChart) has announced plans to cut 7,800 jobs by 2030, citing its growing use of AI. Chief executive Bill Winters called the workers in the mostly back-office roles on the chopping block “lower-value human capital”.

The scheduled cuts amount to some 15% of StanChart’s 52,000 back-office roles.

‘It’s not cost cutting’

StanChart is based in London, but focuses its attentions on the Asia-Pacific and Africa (which is also, coincidentally, where the bank has faced heavy fines for attempted manipulation of the South African Rand-USD exchange rate in 2023).

The majority of roles up for redundancy are located in Bengaluru, Chennai, Kuala Lumpur and Warsaw. The bank’s total global workforce amounts to almost 82,000, with the back-office jobs making up nearly two-thirds of that number.

CEO Bill Winters told reporters that:

It’s not cost cutting, it’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in. We don’t have job losses, but we do have job role reductions in favour of the machines, and that will accelerate as we go forward into AI.

Winters added that StanChart was also increasing the automation of its core banking system, and that:

Of course we’re using AI along the way and AI will be a huge facilitator and enabler of that.

The CEO also claimed that the axed workers would be offered a chance to keep their job via a retraining programme. However, there’s very little chance that everyone whose roles were replaced by AI would be able to keep their job.

AI: a threat to workers …

StanChart may be an outlier in actually acknowledging that it’s using AI to replace human roles, but it’s far from alone. Across the banking sector and society more broadly, AI is rapidly becoming a threat to employment – particularly for entry-level workers.

In 2025, investment bank Morgan Stanley published research suggesting that, by 2030, AI could endanger over 200,000 banking jobs across Europe. Even companies that aren’t actively firing workers have slowed hiring to a crawl, as the Guardian reported:

The buy now, pay later company Klarna said in December 2024 that the company had stopped hiring a year earlier, as AI was able to start doing the work of hundreds of staff across the company.

Over in the US, the number of entry-level jobs across all sectors has dropped by a massive 35% in the 18 months before March 2026. According to HR data aggregator Revelio Labs, AI is a major contributor to that fall.

However, the AI replacements for junior roles aren’t performing well in their tasks, either. The World Economic Forum recently stated that:

reports now indicate that the work assumed to be done by AI in early-career roles is simply being pushed upward – leaving middle management and senior talent overextended, burned out and increasingly disengaged as they absorb junior tasks.

… And a threat to the environment

Coupled with the threat to workers, widespread AI adoption is also a dire threat to the already deeply-imperiled climate. As the Canary previously reported, the Yale School of the Environment published research into just how much energy it takes to power AI in comparison to traditional computing. It found that:

A.I. use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which A.I. run.

That massive fresh-water consumption is down to the fact that AI data centres use cleaned – i.e., potable – water to cool their internal systems:

For example, in The Dalles, Oregon, where Google runs three data centers and plans two more, the city government filed a lawsuit in 2022 to keep Google’s water use a secret from farmers, environmentalists, and Native American tribes who were concerned about its effects on agriculture and on the region’s animals and plants.

In StanChart’s case – and Winter’s callous attitude towards “low-level human capital” – we can see AI’s threat against workers in real time. However, given the massive environmental impacts of the technology, we’re likely only beginning to see the devastating effects that the elites’ AI obsession will have on our societies.

Featured image via Bryan Bedder / Getty Images