When Lloyds Bank announced a £2bn cost-cutting strategy powered by artificial intelligence, the headline figures told a familiar story of efficiency and productivity. But a letter published in The Guardian by Dr Gleb Tsipursky demands a harder look at the arithmetic, arguing that the bank should publish the human cost behind those savings.
Tsipursky contends that banks often count the minutes saved by an employee using an AI tool, while ignoring the downstream burden placed on colleagues who must check invented facts, repair customer messages, explain rejected applications and escalate errors. This oversight, he writes, raises a question that financial targets alone cannot answer: who absorbs the work when automation fails?
The critique lands at a pivotal moment for workplace AI governance. Tsipursky warns that a system can make one team look more productive while moving risk and effort elsewhere—distorting productivity metrics and externalizing the operational costs onto human staff rather than eliminating them.