AI Is the Icing, Not the Cake
Barclays announced its third-quarter earnings on October 22. With them came plans to cut about 5,000 jobs - roughly 5% of its workforce - by the end of the year. About 1,000 were already gone by midyear.
Most of the cuts (about 60%) are in support functions, including developers. A month earlier, Barclays' own research team published a study on which jobs are most exposed to AI. Computing, engineering and science roles came out near the top. The bank hasn't said the study shaped the cuts, but they land in a lot of the same places.
Their CEO said: "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."
Fair enough. But Barclays says more than 16,000 of its employees already use an internal AI assistant. AI sorts and routes about 120,000 client emails a day in one division. Their coding tool is expected to reach half their developers by year end. And their CFO tied the cuts partly to AI. I think the CEO believes what he said, and I think he's right about the infrastructure. I just don't think the job cuts and the AI rollout are two separate stories.
So what does this mean for a company like ours? Revolution Group has about 30 people. Barclays has more than 90,000. Some of this applies to us and some of it doesn't.
What applies: the kind of work Barclays flagged - repetitive, process-driven, technical - is a real part of what an MSP does too. Ticket triage. Routine configuration. First drafts of documentation. The troubleshooting steps that follow a script before someone really needs to think. Some of our own people do that kind of work on a daily basis.
What doesn't apply (as far as I can tell): the idea that jobs here are about to disappear. What I do think will happen is that the difference between the routine part of the job and the part that humans do well will get a lot easier to see. The routine part gets faster with AI's help. What's left is judgment, the client relationship, and the experience and intuition to recognize complicated problems and solve them. That was always the job. It's just going to be a bigger share of it.
If you run a company our size, have you talked with your team about this yet? Are they worried that AI is coming for their job? The real conversation is about how parts of everyone's day are about to get easier, and how this will enable them to do the work you really want them to do. Most owners I talk to haven't had it yet. We're having it at Revolution Group, and I'll share how it goes in a future post.
— Rick