its initial assessment "did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations and this error meant the roles were not redundant."
Commonwealth Bank cut 45 customer service roles in its direct banking team and put an AI voice bot in their place, on the stated basis that the bot had reduced call volumes. Australia's Finance Sector Union said the opposite was happening: that calls were rising, that staff were being offered overtime to cope and that team leaders were being put on the phones. The bank reversed the redundancies, apologised to the staff, and gave the reason quoted above. It is the clearest case on this page of a rollback where the AI was not the thing that failed: the bot did some work, and the mistake was the measurement that turned that into a headcount decision before anybody checked whether the calls had actually gone anywhere.
