Law firm Clifford Chance will cut the number of business services staff at its London base by 10%, with the decision driven by the increased use of artificial intelligence.
The head of PwC also suggested that AI could lead to fewer employees being hired by accounting and consulting groups.
Clifford Chance, one of the largest international law firms, will make around 50 positions redundant in areas such as finance, human resources and IT, and make up to 35 other positions redundant, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the cuts.
The FT report said the job cuts were due to increased use of AI and reduced demand for some business services, as well as increased work from offices outside Clifford Chance’s core UK and US operations, such as Poland and India.
A Clifford Chance spokesperson said: “In line with our strategy to strengthen our business, we can confirm that we are proposing changes to some of our London-based business professional functions.
“The proposed changes could see the creation of new roles, changes to the scope of roles, review of team structures and, in some cases, reductions in roles.”
White-collar, or office-based, jobs are often said to be vulnerable to advances in AI, a term that refers to computer systems that perform cognitive tasks commonly associated with human intelligence.
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AI can help employees perform some tasks faster, such as coding, research, scheduling meetings, and reviewing contracts. Experts believe that as systems become more capable of handling certain tasks autonomously, companies will consider hiring fewer employees or reducing the number of employees to ensure increased productivity.
In a recent survey of 850 business leaders, four in 10 (41%) bosses said AI would allow them to reduce headcount. The British Standards Institute poll looked at seven countries: the UK, the US, France, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.
Mohamed Khande, PwC’s global chairman, said the advent of AI would prevent the company from hiring 100,000 people over five years, a goal set in 2021, suggesting entry-level jobs could be affected.
“When we made plans to employ so many people, the world looked very different,” he told the BBC. “Now we have artificial intelligence. We want to hire, but I don’t know if it’s going to be the same level of people that we hire. It’s going to be a different set of people.”
But Khande added that PwC is having trouble recruiting AI specialists. “We are currently looking for hundreds of engineers to help us advance our AI agenda, but we are having trouble finding them,” he said.
PwC’s UK chief said in September that while AI was “definitely reshaping roles”, the firm’s decline in graduate recruitment this year was due to a slowdown in economic activity.
