Allianz plans to cut hundreds of jobs to focus on implementing artificial intelligence, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday (July 8), citing comments from CEO Thomas Kunzmann.
According to the report, the jobs targeted for job cuts include Allianz Partners, the German financial services company’s assistance and travel division.
Kunzmann reportedly said at an event in Munich that the company expects the cuts to be in the form of severance agreements, early retirement and similar options, affecting between 1,500 and 1,800 positions across Europe.
“It can happen to any of us at some point,” Kunzman said of the layoffs, according to the report. “We will treat these colleagues appropriately, and that is to say fairly.”
Allianz Partners, which has more than 22,000 employees, previously warned that its staffing levels could be affected by AI projects and cited technology as a factor in job cuts, according to the report.
In January, the company announced plans to work with Anthropic to bring AI across its global insurance operations, adding Anthropic’s Claude model to Allianz’s internal AI platform, which is available to everyone within Allianz.
As massive spending on AI technology continues, concerns about the impact of AI on jobs are growing, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg found that 27% of workers in developed countries are likely to be “significantly” affected by AI.
However, in recent weeks, a number of reports have suggested that the extent of the impact may have been exaggerated. As investors worry about the viability of the AI boom, companies that once saw AI as a replacement for workers are starting to rehire.
Among the companies shifting gears is Ford, which has begun rehiring hundreds of engineers to address quality issues that automated systems weren’t able to address.
“Artificial intelligence is a great tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” said Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering.
Meanwhile, executives who once warned that AI would lead to massive job losses are backtracking on their predictions. Attitudes are now changing among tech CEOs about the impact of AI on jobs.
“While we were mostly right about the technical predictions, we were quite wrong about the social and economic impact,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
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