Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters, facing backlash over his description of employees whose jobs would be absorbed by artificial intelligence, sought to reframe the narrative Wednesday.

“I know this may be unsettling when reduced to simple headlines or a quote out of context,” Winters said in a memo to employees, seen by Banking Dive. “Where roles do fall away, it reflects changes in the work, not the value of our people.”

StanChart, at an investor event in Hong Kong a day earlier, announced plans to eliminate more than 7,800 back-office jobs over the next four years in favor of AI.

“It’s not cost cutting,” Winters said. “It’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.”

The value assignment, however, has spurred blistering criticism.

“People should not be framed as disposable inputs to be replaced by financial capital or AI,” Simon Peter Leung, a Singapore-based risk and compliance executive, wrote Thursday on LinkedIn, in response to a Tuesday post from Winters. Risk and compliance is an area Standard Chartered has targeted for AI-related cuts.

“Calling staff ‘lower-value’ is not only insensitive, but also risks undermining trust and morale,” Leung wrote. “This is how the bank gets a bad name in the job market.”

Leung, who has worked for BMO and BNP Paribas, may not be an objective voice. He’s also a StanChart alum, according to his LinkedIn profile.

StanChart generates most of its revenue from Asia. Some of the stiffest pushback came from there, too.  

Singapore’s former president, Halimah Yacob, in a Facebook post Tuesday, called Winters’ comments “disturbing” and “demeaning,” and asked StanChart to “carry out retrenchments humanely” and “treat workers with respect.”

Winters emphasized the human component of the bank’s workforce Wednesday.

"I want to be absolutely clear that the future of Standard Chartered depends on the talent, judgment, relationships and commitment of you, our colleagues," he wrote in Wednesday’s memo. "Our progress and ambition are only possible because of what we achieve together."

Fellow bank CEOs had their own take on Winters’ Tuesday comments. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who described Winters as a friend, called the StanChart chief’s wording “inartful.”

“I think it will be old jobs,” Dimon told Bloomberg on Thursday, categorizing the work replaced by AI. “If back-office jobs disappear, we need more front-office jobs to cover more clients.”

Dimon projected that AI would reduce the workforce at his bank, too, “down the road,” but said “it’s incumbent upon us, society, to think through if it happens too fast.”

Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan, speaking to Bloomberg on Wednesday, emphasized the importance of human capital.

“What people do are jobs, and a job is much more than a collection of tasks,” he said. “And that’s the thing we have to keep in mind, I think.”

He added that he has seen an increase in personal productivity from using AI, “just as when search came on the internet.”

“Now you’ve just got to take tasks and make them more productive,” Venkatakrishnan said.

Barclays wasn’t the only London-based bank to touch on that. HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery told his bank’s workforce to make sure they were "not fighting us, not disenfranchised, not anxious, overwhelmed, and resisting the change," adding that AI could make them "more productive versions of themselves".

"We all know generative AI will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs," Elhedery said, according to Reuters.

For his part, Winters, in his Wednesday memo, reinforced the same.

"Some roles ‌will ⁠reduce in number, some will change, and new opportunities will emerge. We will continue to prioritize investment in reskilling and redeployment wherever we can," he said. “Where changes do happen, we will handle them with thought and care.”

At least one regulator, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, asked StanChart if Winters’ comments were meant as a pretext to use AI to cut staff, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

“Talent is core to our strategy as we continue to invest to create new, reskill and redeploy roles,” StanChart said in an emailed statement. “This will be done in line with regulatory expectations.”