Not seeing the impact of AI; the recent decline in employee base is not due to technology: SBI Deputy Prime Minister

A senior official from Mumbai (PTI) National Bank of India (PTI) said on Thursday that the National Bank of India has not seen any impact on the adoption of its increasing number of artificial intelligence tools in terms of work.

Nitin Chugh, deputy managing director of the country’s largest lender, said the decline in total staff in the past few years was not due to technology adoption by banks, but to other issues such as scheduled retirement.

“…We see no risks.” Chugh, head of SBI Digital Banking and Transformation, told reporters at an event here, answering specific questions about banks’ technical plans.

Comments by senior SBI officials were posted within weeks of Singapore’s DBS CEO Piyush Gupta, which shows that AI is affecting one-tenth of lenders.

Chugh said the situation across the staff has dropped slightly over the past few years, adding that it has nothing to do with technology.

Chugh attempted to attribute the reduction in staff reduction to retirement, saying the overall base depends on the intake and outflow of staff in the system, and stressed that the SBI continues to employ the same number of probation personnel each year.

Chugh said the nature of the job will go through transformation, adding that people with the right skills will use technical input in their daily work better than those who don’t.

He said the bank doubled its team of data scientists and had installed the entire team that will focus on digital marketing and continue to take on other technology-related roles.

Chugh said at an event hosted by global tech guru Microsoft that the bank is trying to deploy AI Co-Pilots and aims to introduce proxy AI to future front-end and back-end employees.

The ultimate goal is to provide a proxy AI to customers, he said, refusing to provide a timeline for this.

However, he seems to suggest that India insists that authentication transactions will not affect the emergence of proxy AI, as the technology has the ability to build the necessary guardrails.

SBI has a framework for AI responsible and ethical use, he said, adding that it was indeed the case last year. ₹Loans of Rs 140,000 crore using technology input.

Chugh said the bank is cautious about what is on the public cloud and what is done privately, noting that it adopts a hybrid approach that remains on its private cloud on the approach and uses Microsoft’s Azure products to do the calculations.

Sonia Kulkarni, national head of Microsoft’s banking, financial services and insurance verticals, said many entities have benefited from recent AI tools.