ANZ Group Holdings Ltd. CEO Nuno Matos used the Australian Financial Review Asia Summit in Sydney on Tuesday to deliver a blunt assessment: AI brings unpredictable risks, and he won't promise there won't be sweeping job cuts as the bank rolls it out. ANZ, based in Melbourne, has around 40,000 employees.
"At this point in time, it's creating risks at a much higher pace than what their own builders and developers were thinking," Matos said. He cited recent comments from Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman about easing the pace of AI model development, remarks that have prompted a rebuke from President Donald Trump. "They are saying that the risk of this technology is well above what they expected," he said.
Matos added that while AI can improve lives and expand capabilities, without "enough guardrails and limitations," dangerous outcomes follow. "It'll attack infrastructure," he said. On the potential for job losses, Matos emphasized the uncertainty, noting that anyone claiming certainty "will lie to you."
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Rival Westpac Banking Corp. pitched a different angle on Tuesday, telling investors AI is giving time back to employees. Andrew McMullan, who holds the title of chief data, digital and AI officer at Westpac, said in a presentation that five AI agents working across mortgages and consumer finance are expected to remove 250,000 manual tasks and unlock about 150,000 hours of banker capacity annually. The bank attributed roughly 100,000 hours per year to automating checks of payslips and bank statements in home loans and another roughly 50,000 hours in consumer finance, and described all of these as estimated annual benefits.
You're hearing two truths at once: one big bank is worried AI could destabilize jobs and critical systems, while another is already tallying productivity wins. The spread between those outcomes is the story to watch. If adoption skews toward efficiency, margins can improve; if disruption dominates, the labor and regulatory overhang gets heavier. Either way, the rollout is moving, and it will land in both earnings and headlines.
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