Artificial intelligence (AI) already threatens jobs in Spain. The company Allianz Partners—a subsidiary of the German insurance giant Allianz—has announced today to worker representatives that it is contemplating a 20% workforce reduction, which would mean cutting around 320 jobs. The main reason given by the company is that the emergence of AI will allow many tasks to be automated and digitized.
At the meeting held this morning between managers and union representatives, it was explained that these departures would be carried out between 2026 and 2027. The formula to be used has not yet been clarified. According to company sources, “we will try to make it as least traumatic as possible.”
Allianz Partners is dedicated to providing travel, car and accident insurance assistance services. This year he completed the integration of the company.
This company’s job cuts are not limited to Spain. The company has more than 20,000 employees in 75 countries and has announced a reduction in its workforce that would affect between 1,500 and 1,800, in the next 12-18 months, according to information provided by the specialized media. Insurance Times.
At Allianz Partners, more than two-thirds of its workers handle customer queries and complaints over the phone, a type of role that is increasingly being replaced by virtual assistants.
The company explains in a statement that “as technology revolutionizes our sector, we are evaluating how to strengthen our position as industry leaders by leveraging AI and actively evaluating how these changes will affect us all in the coming years.”
Spanish union sources complain that the only obsession of the Allianz group is “to achieve a global group profit of 20 billion euros by 2030, even if that means cutting thousands of jobs along the way.” They also remember that, even if they try to adjust the workforce with early retirements and incentivized dismissals, “if they do not reach the expected numbers, they will begin with layoffs.”
In the United States there have already been several companies that have announced employment adjustments linked to the emergence of artificial intelligence. Is .
In the last two years, with the brilliant appearance of the ChatGPT algorithm—developed by OpenAI—and the entry of other competitors in this field of AI, there has been a billion-dollar race to become the leaders of this technology. OpenAI (involved by Microsoft), Meta, Amazon (with its subsidiary AWS, storage and cloud computing) have invested this year more than 400,000 million dollars (about 350,000 million euros) in new data centers and infrastructure linked to AI. Its main supplier has been the microchip manufacturer Nvidia, which .
This investment and stock market furor has its reverse. More and more institutions and experts warn that a bubble is brewing, and that the valuations of the companies that are developing AI are only justified if these algorithms begin to improve productivity and produce tangible benefits for the companies that hire these services. In this b-side of AI, the most vulnerable part are the workers who carry out tasks that, according to business criteria, can be entrusted to computer algorithms.
From Allianz Partners Spain, they emphasize that in this digital transformation, “we do not intend to be the first to make the adaptation at any cost, but rather we aspire to undertake these changes with humanity, respect and seriousness towards all the people who make up the company.”
