HSBC CEO tells staff not to fight AI as bank job cuts mount

TL;DR:

  • HSBC chief executive Georges Elhedery urged the bank’s 211,000 staff not to resist AI, saying generative AI “will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs”.
  • The plea came a day after London-listed Standard Chartered confirmed it would cut almost 8,000 roles by 2030, framing AI as a replacement for “lower-value human capital”.
  • Morgan Stanley analysts found banking, technology and professional services firms had shed one in 20 staff in the past year because of AI, with offshore and entry-level workers hit hardest.

Elhedery’s intervention puts the two largest London-listed Asia-focused banks on the same public footing within 24 hours: AI is now openly part of how their workforces will be sized. Standard Chartered named the number; HSBC named the posture. Bill Winters’ “lower-value human capital” phrasing prompted enough internal pushback that he issued a follow-up memo on Wednesday promising “thought and care” in how changes are handled — a sign of how raw the conversation has become.

A sharper public framing than UK banks usually allow

UK banks have so far preferred to talk about AI in terms of productivity gains and slower hiring. The shift this week is that two of the sector’s biggest names are accepting redundancies are part of the picture, even if HSBC has yet to attach a number. Goldman Sachs flagged potential cuts to staff in October; Wells Fargo’s Charlie Scharf said in December AI had not reduced headcount but was “getting a lot more done”. The HSBC framing — destroy and create — sits closer to Standard Chartered’s than to Wells Fargo’s, signalling where the centre of gravity is moving.

The Oxford Internet Institute’s Fabian Braesemann warned in the same Reuters report against cutting too deep too early: “the point in time may come sooner than you think where the productivity potential of AI is realised, and you want these people.” Separately, a King’s College London study released the same week found six in 10 Britons think AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates and one in five expect civil unrest as a result — a reminder that public sentiment is hardening as the corporate communications shift.

Looking forward

UK regulators will watch what happens between HSBC’s “embrace the change” rhetoric and any redundancy programme that follows. With Standard Chartered’s plan already public, attention turns to whether Lloyds, Barclays and NatWest follow the StanChart model of named cuts or the HSBC model of retraining commitments — and how PRA operational-resilience expectations, consultation duties and Treasury Committee scrutiny shape the next disclosures. For UK SMEs watching their banking partners, the practical question is whether AI-driven service changes affect relationship managers and turnaround times in the months ahead.

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