Barclays cutting 5,000 jobs as it increases reliance on AI - BBC

Barclays has found a use for artificial intelligence at last, and the use is arithmetic: 5,000 jobs going, 1,000 already shut, another 4,000 pencilled in before the year is out. Group chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan announced it in the tone of a man describing a kitchen extension. The AI, he explained, is "the icing on the cake – it's not the cake", because the infrastructure build comes first. So the cake is the data centres. The icing is the 5,000 people who used to make the cake worth eating. One assumes nobody thought to ask the icing.

It is the verb tense that deserves a plaque. Posts "have already closed" — as though a door had swung shut on its own in a draught, like a daffodil. Nobody in that sentence is doing the closing, which is tidy, because the doing of it is happening to 5,000 people and the grammar has been carefully arranged so that no hand appears to be on the handle. Note also the sequencing: cake first, icing later. Which means the remaining 4,000 are contingent — resting on the infrastructure build landing on time, the models behaving, and nothing embarrassing surfacing before the year-end. A redundancy programme with an asterisk and a delivery date.

We have watched this drift before, most recently at Anthropic, where the junior rungs went first and the people who would have climbed them were never counted as a loss at all. Barclays will now do the familiar dance: advertise for AI-literate staff, retrain the survivors, and call the whole thing a reshaping rather than a redundancy, while the chief executive's cake metaphor quietly does the work of implying the people were never the point. The icing does not get a vote, does not get a consultation, and does not get to point out that a cake without icing is, on any honest reading, a biscuit.