American Express is cutting about 3,500 roles, roughly 5% of its 77,000 staff, in a restructuring the company describes as preparing for AI. The announcement came on 23 October. Barclays announced a comparable 5% reduction in the same period.
The timing is the detail worth holding onto. The cuts were disclosed alongside an earnings beat and raised 2026 guidance, not alongside a miss. That is now the recurring shape of AI-attributed restructuring: companies are not cutting because the business is weak, and the AI framing arrives with good results rather than bad ones.
Which makes the attribution hard to audit from outside. No public breakdown exists of which of the 3,500 roles were automatable, and none is likely to appear.
Sources
Banking Dive · Bloomberg