Programmers, creatives, even management consultants are worried AI is going to put them out of a job. But it turns out global banking CEOs are thinking about whether they can be automated away as well.
Tan Su Shan, CEO of DBS, the largest bank in Southeast Asia by assets, got a friendly reminder from her board of how even executives can be automated away upon her appointment to the Singaporean bank’s top job in late March.
“The day my CEO role was announced, I’m in a WhatsApp group with my board. I get a WhatsApp saying that even the CEO’s job will be replaced, or can be replaced, by AI,” Tan said Wednesday at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference. “If I can be replaced by AI, so can everything else!”
That humility about AI drove Tan to push what she called the “four Rs” to her staff. “We’ve got to reinvent ourselves. We’ve got to stay relevant. We’ve got to be resilient, because it’s going to be volatile … and we have to be responsible,” she said.
It’s also changing hiring practices at the bank. “Don’t hire for knowledge, because knowledge is ubiquitous,” Tan said. “Hire for attitude, because you want to hire people who are agile, who are humble, who are able to say, ‘Whatever I knew up to today is no longer relevant today or tomorrow.’”
At Fortune’s conference, Tan said while both junior and senior employees were eager to adopt AI, “it was the middle that was the least engaged.”
Tan noted she told DBS staff that AI could make them “superhuman bankers”—and shared one personal example of how AI got her out of a work crisis.
“I remember going to a client pitch quite unprepared. As the client was talking to me, I had my phone under the table,” she said. Tan said she surreptitiously asked the AI to think of questions to ask. “The client said: ‘Wow, you know my business so well!’”
“So I cheated,” Tan said, with a smile.
