The bank that took a 3,000-person job down to 135, and says it moved them rather than cut them
Singapore · Piyush Gupta, Tan Su Shan
Published August 11, 2026
When AI started absorbing routine work, DBS's outgoing chief executive said the part most bank bosses leave out, that he could no longer see how to create jobs. His successor has spent the time since moving people into different ones, and is equally plain about the roughly 4,000 temporary workers her promise was never going to cover.
The story
The people and the place
DBS is Singapore's largest bank, with 39,721 employees at the end of 2025. Piyush Gupta ran it for fifteen years. Tan Su Shan took over in March 2025 and inherited the problem he had just described in public.
The problem they were facing
AI is genuinely absorbing routine banking work. The common response is quiet attrition and reassurances vague enough that nobody has to say who is actually affected.
The moment somebody said it out loud
In February 2025, at an IT event in India, Gupta gave up the comfortable line. "In my 15 years of being a CEO, for the first time, I'm struggling to create jobs. I'm struggling to say how I will repurpose people to create jobs." In the same breath he said the bank would add 1,000 new AI positions.
What changed
Entry-level production engineering, the routine operations work, went from 3,000 people to 135 by July 2026. The bank says those affected were retrained and moved into other tech roles inside the company. Some 13,000 staff have been earmarked for reskilling and more than 10,000 have begun training, tellers are being redefined toward customer relationships and digital servicing, and there is an internal learning hub with more than 10,000 classes in it. Three things sit beside that and belong next to it: roughly 4,000 temporary and contract roles are being phased out through natural attrition, those 8,000 to 9,000 contract workers were never counted in the bank's headcount in the first place, and DBS's own headcount fell by 1,624 during 2025, which the bank attributes mainly to integration work in India and Taiwan rather than to AI.
The move
Tan put the choice in plain terms, and then the bank spent eighteen months doing the more expensive version of it. If you are watching a function get automated near you, the question worth borrowing is the one she asked out loud: what happens to the people who have been here twenty years? Know someone whose employer chose the harder path? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"Other people might say it's easier, just fire everyone and then hire again, but if you do that, then where is the humanistic appreciation of people who've been with you 30 years, 40 years, 20 years?" (Tan Su Shan, CEO, DBS, in Forbes)
Verified sources
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Sources last verified August 11, 2026.