Active BC (part of Sberbank) presented a teller robot at the 2018 Russian Tech Week. The development will allow fulfilling Sberbank CEO Herman Gref’s promise to reduce the number of employees by 150K by 2025.
The new teller robot is based on the collector robot presented by Active BC in 2017. The collector robot makes around 60% of calls to debtors. The new robot will have broader functions and will be used in advertising campaigns, telemarketing, cross trading, as well as for housing and utilities payments and microfinancing services.
It is expected that the new project will allow reducing the number of call center staff. The robot will be able to work 24/7 and make more than 10K calls per month. Implementing the new development will move forward the downsizing announced by Sberbank CEO Herman Gref.
In mid-November, Herman Gref spoke at the Sberbank Data Science Day annual international conference on machine learning, data analysis and artificial intelligence and announced that the AI expansion has already resulted in downsizing the bank staff. Specifically, robots had replaced around 70% bank tellers. Sberbank has laid off 14,000 employees since the beginning of the year.