Barclays is the latest high street bank to announce a headcount reduction at the same time as an expansion in the use of AI.
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The cuts amount to around 5% of the bank's 93,000 global workforce. Arouind 1,000 job cuts have already been made with the remaining 4,000 to be spread over the rest of the year.
A signficant proportion of the job losses will be for back-office functions in the retail banking sector, work done in both the UK and India.
According to Barclays group chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan, the changes are a result of an ongoing modernisation that involves greater investment in technology to produce operaitonal efficiencies.
This includes greater use of AI, a move that Venkatakrishnan describes as the "icing on the cake" in terms of its operational strategy.
Earlier this month, the bank announced that it would be expanding its use of the Anthropic AI agent Claude in an effort to accelerate software development, modernise its legacy systems and boost operational efficiency.
“AI has an important role to play and may have a more important role to play in the future," said Venkatakrishnan. "I’ve often said that it is the icing on the cake – it’s not the cake – because you need to do the infrastructure build to get the benefits of AI. Where the infrastructure is modern, we’ve been applying it here.”
The bank is coming to the end of a three-year cost-cutting strategy that has seen increased spending on technology and has been focused largely on retail banking operations.
Around £600m in savings have been made already this year, states the bank, with another £300m expected before the year-end.
The update on operational strategy was made during the bank's Q3 earnings' announcement with the bank reporting a pre-tax profit of £2.3bn for the three months beween July and September, a 12% increase on the same period in 2025.
Barclays is not the only bank to announce both the greater use of AI and a reduction in the work force. National Australia Bank, HSBC and Deutsche Bank have alll made similar announcements over the last 18 months.