Barclays to cut 5000 jobs this year amid artificial intelligence push
Barclays expects to have cut about 5,000 jobs by the end of 2026 after using artificial intelligence (AI) to make its work more efficient.
The bank says this is about five per cent of its total workforce. It had around 93,000 employees worldwide at the end of 2025.
About 1,000 jobs were cut in the first half of 2026. The remaining cuts are planned for the second half of the year.
Most of the job cuts affect staff who handle daily operations and support the bank's main work.
Barclays group chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan, known at the bank as Venkat, said the cuts were “a result of the investments made into technology over a number of years and which we continue to make”.
Venkat said the bank's technology investment included “modernising our platforms and harmonising our systems and having simpler and better processes”.
He added: “That is driving the bulk of the efficiency gains that you’ve seen so far.”
“Artificial intelligence 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 artificial intelligence.”
“Where the infrastructure is modern, we’ve been applying it here.”
Barclays has started using AI to make some work processes faster and more efficient. This means the bank can employ fewer people in some jobs, such as software development.
In the third quarter, Barclays made about £200 million in what it called “structural cost actions”. These were part of savings and cost-cutting measures worth about £600 million during the year.
Most of the cost cuts came from the bank's UK retail business, which serves everyday customers. Some also came from its investment bank.
Barclays said it plans to make about £300 million more in savings during the final three months of the year.
The news comes as the bank reported a pre-tax profit of £2.3 billion for the three months ending in September. This was 12 per cent higher than its pre-tax profit in the same period a year earlier.