Barclays bank expects about 5,000 job cuts. Its finance chief tied one group in them to AI, the bank's developers.
Barclays expects to cut about 5,000 full-time jobs, diginomica reported on 22 October.
About 1,000 have already gone, and 4,000 more are to go before the end of the year. Quarterly profit rose 12% to £2.3 billion.
Finance chief Angela Cross told analysts that around 60% of the actions are in support functions, "including fewer developers as AI makes our people more productive." The bank gave no number for developer roles.
Paul Hardy, an SAP Mentor at Heidelberg Materials, has put numbers on one task where developer hours go. He told SAPinsider that hand-written unit tests double development time, by his estimate. An AI tool drafts a full set in seconds, and fixing its errors takes him about an hour. He says developers remain responsible for the code.
Our reading for delivery leads: a plan priced in developer days may now hold tasks a client expects at AI speed. Someone still reads and fixes what the AI wrote, and that review time belongs in the estimate.
Sources
For your next steering committee
- 1Ask your integrator to name the people on your programme and to confirm which of them are staying.
- 2Ask what the contract says about replacing key people, and who approves a replacement.
- 3Ask where knowledge of your configuration is written down, outside the heads of the people who built it.
Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01
Welcome back. · Issue 01
