Two of Australia's most recognisable corporate names have announced thousands of job losses within days of each other, and a leading workplace strategy consultant says the timing is no coincidence. The cuts at WiseTech Global and Commonwealth Bank are not, he argues, the familiar story of businesses tightening belts during a rough patch. They are something more durable and more disruptive.
WiseTech Global revealed this week that roughly 2,000 positions are expected to be eliminated across 2026 and 2027 as part of an AI-driven efficiency programme. The day before that announcement, it emerged Commonwealth Bank is cutting 300 roles. Together, the figures put a sharp human face on a trend that has, until recently, felt abstract to many Australian workers.
Richard Valente, vice-president of customer experience strategy at TP Australia, works directly with large companies on AI transformation and workforce planning. He was unambiguous in his assessment when speaking to 9News. "This isn't a cyclical job cut," Valente said. "It's a structural reset of the workforce. The era of large, transaction-processing teams is ending. Banks are moving to smaller, highly specialised workforces who manage AI systems, interpret complex data and step in when things go wrong."
That framing carries real weight for workers in sectors long considered stable. Back-office processing, routine customer service, and data entry roles, the kind of work that has quietly underpinned employment in banking and logistics for decades, are precisely the functions AI handles most efficiently. The question of what replaces them is not yet settled.
Valente's view is that the employees who remain will face a higher bar. "The future frontline banker won't just process requests," he said. "They'll be problem solvers, relationship managers and trust builders." That may sound like an opportunity, and for some workers it genuinely will be. For others, particularly those without access to retraining or whose skills sit squarely in the automated zone, the transition will be considerably harder.
There is a legitimate counter-argument to the alarm. Economists who study technological disruption point out that previous waves of automation, from mechanised manufacturing to ATMs in banking, ultimately generated more jobs than they destroyed, even if the transition was painful for those caught in the middle. The Reserve Bank of Australia and others have noted that productivity gains from AI could, over time, lift wages and create entirely new categories of work that are difficult to predict today. History, on balance, supports measured optimism about long-term employment levels, even as it demands honest acknowledgement of short-term dislocation.
Valente himself raised a commercial risk that cuts against the pure efficiency argument. Organisations that treat AI solely as a cost reduction tool, he warned, risk damaging their relationships with customers. "Customers will still want empathy, reassurance and human judgement, particularly when dealing with money, fraud or financial hardship." That is not a sentimental observation; it is a business reality that banks, which depend heavily on trust, cannot afford to dismiss.
The policy dimension is also significant. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and the Fair Work Commission will face growing pressure to assess whether existing frameworks adequately protect workers displaced by automation, and whether retraining obligations on large employers should be strengthened. The government's role here is contested: too little intervention and vulnerable workers are left exposed; too much and businesses may simply accelerate offshoring or delay investment in Australian operations altogether.
Valente's prescription sits somewhere in the practical middle. Successful companies, he argued, will be those that invest in retraining and redeployment rather than treating redundancy as a clean exit. He also called on organisations to show genuine care for those being displaced, including access to career transition support and AI-assisted tools to help workers find new paths. Whether that happens voluntarily or requires regulatory encouragement is a question that governments and businesses will need to answer together, and soon. The pace of change is not waiting for the policy debate to catch up.