To me the most alarming thing out of these Q3 results is their savings target from the original $500 million to a $1 billion.
Takis said they introduced AI and machine learning with Clover risk holds which were a manual review process. Those decision times supposedly declined two-thirds and false positives fell by more than 40%. Then there's the customer contact centers. We have AI agents developed with Sierra that achieved a containment rate above 40%. That means the AI can handle a substantial proportion of interactions without a human agent needing to take over.
You literally have a redesign that reduced the required manual workload by 40% with AI. If you had 100 employees doing that, now you only need 60.
And if you assume the total annual employer cost of one position (including salary, benefits, payroll taxes, other employment costs etc) is $125,000, that's 4,000 employees you could cut to make that additional $500 million. And Fiserv already cut 3,000 employees/contractors between Q2 and Q3 so that seems like a doable figure.
The CFO said most of the expected savings would come after 2027 though, so there's still time at least.
But this is looking grim for a lot of us. It was already nerve racking when you had to deal with offshoring work and automation, but now you add in AI and Fiserv doing significant cost cutting...we are sc--wed. Sure find another company to work for but if it's in the same line of work/industry...you know our competitors are doing the exact same thing we are. There is only jumping into another fire out of the frying pan.
I don't like this future.