Allianz Plans to Cut Over 1,500 Jobs as AI Focus Increases

Allianz is planning to cut hundreds of jobs as it focuses on implementing artificial intelligence, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (July 8), citing comments from CEO Tomas Kunzmann.

The layoffs will target the German financial services company’s assistance and travel arm Allianz Partners, the report said.

The cuts, which the company expects to come in the forms of severance agreements, early retirements and similar options, will affect between 1,500 to 1,800 positions across Europe, Kunzmann said at an event in Munich, according to the report.

“This could happen to any of us at some point,” Kunzmann said of the cuts, per the report. “We treat these colleagues exactly as is appropriate—fairly.”

Allianz Partners, which has more than 22,000 employees, previously warned that staffing levels could be affected by its AI projects and cited the technology as a factor in the cuts, the report said.

The company announced in January that it planned to deploy AI throughout its insurance business around the world in collaboration with Anthropic, adding Anthropic’s Claude models to Allianz’s internal AI platform that is available to everyone within Allianz.

Concerns about AI’s impact on work are rising, as massive spending on the technology continues, the Bloomberg report said. Bloomberg found that 27% of workers in advanced economies will likely be “meaningfully” impacted by AI.

However, the past few weeks have seen reports suggesting that the breadth of that impact might be overstated. Companies that once saw AI as a replacement for workers have begun rehiring amid investor worries about the viability of the AI boom.

Among the companies reversing course is Ford, which has begun reemploying hundreds of engineers to handle quality issues that automated systems couldn’t deal with.

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Ford Vice President of Vehicle Hardware Engineering Charles Poon said.

Meanwhile, executives who once warned that AI would lead to mass job losses are walking back those predictions. Now, attitudes among tech CEOs about AI’s impact on employment are shifting.

“We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.

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