Britain's Barclays Bank announced plans to shed 5% of its global workforce as it accelerates its adoption of tech, including Artificial Intelligence.

Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Britain's Barclays Bank announced plans Thursday to shed 5,000 jobs -- equivalent to 5% of its global workforce -- as part of a modernization drive using technology to streamline its business in readiness for a future where AI will play an increasingly important role.

With 1,000 employees already gone, Barclays said the full reduction in headcount would be complete by the end the year with sizeable cuts falling on staff in India performing back office functions for its U.K. retail banking operation, the main focus of a three year, $1.47 billion cost-cutting drive.

Chief executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan did not say AI was behind the cuts but said they reflected the "deep investments" Barclays was making in technology and simplifying its business, saying those factors were "driving the bulk of the efficiency gains" realized thus far.

"AI has an important role to play and may have a more important role to play in the future. We will employ the AI at scale. But AI is the icing on the cake not the cake. Because you need to do the infrastructure build to get the benefits of AI," said Venkatakrishnan.

The cuts announcement came as Barclays posted $3.1 billion profit for the June to August quarter, up 12% from the same period in 2025, but missed expectations by $133.7 million due to its fixed income trading operation not performing as well as market anlaysts predicted.

The announcement comes two weeks after London-headquartered HSBC, Europe's largest bank, announced a jobs bloodbath across its wealth management business as part of a transition to greater use of AI to service high net-worth individuals on its books.

The Financial Times said 70% of the bank's U.K.-based financial advisers would be let go by the end of October.

In May, Britain's Standard Chartered bank, said its increased deployment of AI would see about 7,800 jobs go by 2030 equivalent to more than 15% of its back-office workforce, although the BBC said it had information that some affected workers would be kept on, but in different jobs.

A Gallup poll in September revealed the proportion of the U.S. workforce feared they would be replaced by technology at a new high.

Twenty-seven percent said they were worried about their jobs, up seven percentage points on 2025 and the highest proportion since Gallup first posed the question in 2017. Back then losing a job to technology was a concern to just 13% of Americans workers.