Barclays to cut 5,000 jobs this year as AI makes work more efficient

Barclays has revealed it expects to have cut around 5,000 staff by the end of 2026 after turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to make the bank more efficient.The banking group said this is the equivalent of about 5% of all its employees, which totalled around 93,000 globally at the end of 2025.Some 1,000 of the roles were cut during the first half of 2026, and the remainder are spread out over the second half of the year.The majority of the reductions relate to operational and functional roles across the bank.EN41T7 Barclays Bank HQ in Churchill Place, Canary Wharf London UKGroup chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan, known within the bank as Venkat, said this was “a result of the investments which we’ve made into technology over a number of years and which we continue to make”.This has seen the adoption of AI to make some work processes more efficient, which has meant the bank can employ fewer roles such as developers.Venkat said the tech investment involved “modernising our platforms and harmonising our systems and having simpler and better processes”.“That is driving the bulk of the efficiency gains that you’ve seen so far,” he said.“AI has an important role to play and may have a more important role to play in the future.“I’ve often said that it is the icing on the cake – it’s not the cake – because you need to do the infrastructure build to get the benefits of AI.“Where the infrastructure is modern, we’ve been applying it here.”Barclays is coming towards the end of a three-year strategy to boost performance, which has involved major cost-cutting and ramping up technology capabilities.In the third quarter, the company made some £200 million worth of “structural cost actions”, part of about £600 million made during the year.This is around double what it had been expecting to have achieved earlier in the year.Barclays chief executive Venkat, left, said the Chancellor has his ‘full support and backing’ ahead of the autumn Budget (Lucy North/PA)PA ArchiveThe bulk of the cost cutting came from the UK retail bank, but a proportion was also in its investment bank.Barclays said it has a further roughly £300 million worth of savings planned for the final three months of the year.Read MoreIt comes as the banking group reported a pre-tax profit of £2.3 billion for the three months to the end of September, which was 12% higher than the same period a year ago.Income from both its UK retail and corporate banks increased, as well as from its wealth management arm and investment bank.The financial results come less than a week before Chancellor John Healey delivers his autumn Budget statement, with speculation that he is considering increasing taxes on banks to raise revenues for the Treasury.Asked about the speculation, Venkat said he had made his position on bank taxes “very clear”, having previously spoken out about the UK banking sector having a higher tax burden than other countries.“We are already a bank which makes a lot of our money outside the UK so this is not a question of a financial hit to us – it’s bearable.“It’s a question of proportion and it’s a question of market signalling.“But I deeply respect the responsibilities that the Chancellor bares and he has our full support and backing.”