What humankind feared the most about AI is catching up. Singapore’s biggest bank says it will be laying off 4,000 people over the next three years. This is because AI will be doing more of the work that humans used to do.
A Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) spokesperson said, “The reduction in workforce will come from natural attrition as temporary and contract roles roll off over the next few years.” DBS currently has between 8,000 and 9,000 temporary and contract workers, for a total of about 41,000 people working for the bank.
Major Asia bank to cut 4,000 roles as AI replaces humans https://t.co/RZa7ooqGik
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) February 25, 2025
The cuts will affect permanent workers. Piyush Gupta, the bank’s outgoing CEO, said that the company plans to create about 1,000 new jobs tied to AI. He said last year that DBS had been working on AI for more than ten years.
“We today deploy over 800 AI models across 350 use cases, and expect the measured economic impact of these to exceed S$1bn ($745m; £592m) in 2025.”
~ Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS
In the same light, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) report last year, AI will affect almost 40% of all jobs around the world. The threats of AI are getting more attention as it becomes more common. Unemployment will rise at first because some companies will decide to cut staff to save time with AI.
Over 40% of companies worldwide plan to reduce workforces to employ AI
AI is going to take your job. According to a survey released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) 41% of employers plan to cut staff as AI automates some jobs.
The WEF’s future of jobs report shows that 77% of the big companies surveyed worldwide said they planned to reskill and upskill their current employees between 2025 and 2030 so that they could work better with AI.
The WEF said, “Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market — driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers.”
Employers think that the jobs of postal service clerks, senior secretaries, and payroll clerks will lose the most workers in the next few years. This could be because of AI or other trends.
The report said, “The presence of both graphic designers and legal secretaries just outside the top 10 fastest-declining job roles, a first-time prediction not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate GenAI’s increasing capacity to perform knowledge work.”
AI has already replaced many humans. Some tech companies, like Dropbox, which stores files, and Duolingo, which helps you learn languages, have recently laid off workers and said it was because of AI.
In the UK, analysts have observed that AI could eventually take away 1 to 3 million jobs. Importantly, though, these job losses won’t happen all at once. Instead, they will happen more slowly as AI is used more in other parts of the economy.
This means that between 60,000 and 275,000 jobs are lost each year, which is pretty low compared to the average number of jobs lost in the UK over the last ten years (450,000 per year) and even lower compared to the total number of people working (33 million).
In Europe, people are in fear. People from all nine European countries that were surveyed agreed on one thing: AI will affect their work. In fact, 53% of those surveyed said that AI use already affects their work.
This number is almost six in ten in Italy and Switzerland, both with 59%. Along with the Netherlands (57%), Austria (56%), and Germany (56%), this number is also higher than the average. In France (47%), Belgium (48%), and Spain and Portugal (49% each), on the other hand, it is below average.
However, the opposite is also true: people need AI skills more and more. The most recent survey, which was done last year, found that 62% of companies want to hire more people with skills to better work with AI, and 67% want to hire more people with skills to create AI tools and enhancements.
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