Maxim Builov’s column about artificial intelligence of Sberbank

The head of Sberbank German Gref, speaking at a meeting of the supervisory board of ANO “Russia is a country of opportunities”, said that the bank annually invests about $1 billion in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and receives about $3 billion from this. At the same time, the bank “very much” has been investing in this area for 12-13 years, approximately since 2010, three years after Mr. Gref took over as head of it.

In rubles, income from the introduction of artificial intelligence is growing. In 2021, it was estimated at about 200 billion rubles, in 2022 – at 250 billion rubles, and this year it is planned to increase it to 350 billion rubles. It is worth noting that over the past year, Sberbank’s net profit under IFRS amounted to only 270.5 billion rubles, that is, artificial intelligence earned more than 90% of the bank’s profit.

One of the important components of such a noticeable financial result is the reduction of costs, and primarily on employees.

Back at the end of 2018, German Gref at the Sberbank Data Science Day conference said that the introduction of AI in the bank led to the reduction of about 70% of middle-level employees. “We are drastically reducing people who perform some very simple operations,” the head of Sberbank said then.

Confirms the trend and the bank’s ESG report for the past year. From 2019 to 2022, the number of bank employees decreased from 241 thousand people to 211 thousand people. At the same time, German Gref, in response to a question from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who participated in the meeting, whether artificial intelligence would replace the head of Sberbank, replied that “everything is moving towards this,” but “I hope not in my lifetime.”

Artificial intelligence has another important feature that can attract the largest bank in the country. In the user agreements of many neural networks, according to media reports, there is a warning that the user, not the developer, is responsible for the results of working with it. This item is in the user agreements for the Masterpiece application from Yandex and ChatGPT. It is also present in the user agreement of the Kandinsky neural network from Sberbank.

Thus, an ideal worker is obtained from AI – it triples the money invested in it, and in which case it does not bear any responsibility.

If we develop the idea of ​​German Gref about what is going to what, then in the foreseeable future we will live like in a song from the movie “Adventures of Electronics” – “robots work hard, not people.” The only question remains: what will a person freed from work by artificial intelligence live on? So, maybe the head of Sberbank was not joking at all.