Dont see AI impacting jobs; recent dip in staff base not due to tech: SBI Deputy MD

Mumbai, Apr 3 (PTI) State Bank of India does not see any impact of its increasing adoption of artificial intelligence tools on the jobs front, a senior official said on Thursday.

Nitin Chugh, a deputy managing director at the country's largest lender, said the reduction in the overall staff over the last few years is not due to technology adoption by the bank, but due to other issues like scheduled retirements.

"...we don't see any kind of risk there," Chugh, who heads the digital banking and transformation at SBI, told reporters at an event here, replying to a specific question on the risks on jobs as the bank goes ahead with its technology initiatives.

The comments from the senior SBI official come within weeks of Singapore's DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta suggesting that AI is impacting a tenth of jobs at the lender.

Chugh said the overall staff has come down marginally over the last few years, and added that it has nothing to do with technology.

Seeking to attribute the reduction in employee number to retirements, Chugh said the overall base gets determined by the intake versus outflow of people from the system, and underlined that SBI continues to hire the same number of probationary officers every year.

The nature of jobs will undergo a transformation going forward, Chugh said, adding that someone possessing the right skills to use the tech inputs in daily jobs will be better off than the one who does not.

The bank is doubling its team of data scientists, has installed an entire team which will focus on digital marketing and continues to hire for other technology-related roles as well, he said.

Speaking at the event hosted by global tech major Microsoft, Chugh said the bank is experimenting on deploying AI co-pilots and also aims to introduce agentic AI in the future for both the front-end and back-end staff.

The ultimate aim is to have agentic AI for the customers, he said, declining to give a timeline for the same.

He, however, seemed to suggest that India's insistence on authenticating transactions will not impact the advent of agentic AI as technology has the capabilities to build up the necessary guardrails.

SBI has a framework for the responsible and ethical use of AI, he said, adding that last year it did ₹1.4 lakh crore loans using technology inputs.

The bank is cautious about what goes on public cloud and what gets done privately, Chugh said, pointing out that it has adopted a hybrid approach where the dataset stays on its private cloud and the computing is done using Microsoft's Azure offering.

Microsoft's country head for the banking, financial services and insurance vertical, Sonia Kulkarni, said a slew of entities have benefitted from adoption of AI tools in the recent past.