Last Teller Standing: Inside Wells Fargo's AI-Driven Workforce Purge

AI isn't just replacing bank tellers—it's dismantling a middle-class career path and sparking an unprecedented union wave across America's financial sector.

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When bank teller Danielle Oliva comes to work at her Wells Fargo branch in Artesia, New Mexico, these days, there’s no one to chat with behind the glass. “I’m currently the only teller in the lobby,” she says. “When I was hired, we had two or three tellers at any time. It’s now been one teller for about a year and half.” The smaller workforce means longer lines, she says, but she tries to keep up a relationship with those she’s known during her three years at the branch, because “every customer that comes in I know their name, their stories, their families.”

When Wells Fargo CEO and President Charlie Scharf took the stage at an investor conference in New York in December, he told the crowd he was prepared to share something that other bank leaders are “afraid to say.” The bank is laying people off, and not as a temporary measure, but as a permanent change to the business. Because so much work can be supplemented or even replaced with AI, he told investors, “we’re going to have lower headcount in the future.”

Photo by joão vincient lewis on Unsplash

Scharf told the crowd that since he arrived in 2019, Wells Fargo has cut 65,000 workers, reducing the bank’s employees from 275,000 to 210,000. That includes 5,600 workers laid off this year. Meanwhile, he told investors, the bank’s profits are growing. That’s in part because the bank’s federally imposed asset cap was lifted this summer — a regulatory action after Wells Fargo employees were discovered in 2016 to be inventing fake accounts to make company-imposed sales goals. But it’s also because it turns out the bank is wringing more profit out of fewer people, citing “a ​20% growth in new credit card accounts, a 19% jump in auto lending balances, 12% loan growth in commercial banking, and a 14% increase in investment banking fees,” according to the New York Post.

“We have funded significant increased investments in infrastructure and business growth by driving greater savings,” Scharf said in a statement. Layoffs are clearly part of that savings plan, and the plan seems to be working.

As a result, professionals who assumed that the staid world of banking was a stable place to make a career are learning firsthand that their experience won’t protect them. It’s all part of a new and dramatic upheaval of white-collar work that seems sure to intensify this year. And that upheaval is bringing union votes into places like banks that have never seen them before.

“Bank workers haven’t traditionally been unionized in this country —it’s not typical here,” says Communications Workers of America (CWA) Organizing Director Nick Weiner. But suddenly his small team is fielding calls from banks all over the country, inspired, he says, by what’s going on at Wells Fargo. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve won 29 elections around the country. So that’s 29 individual branches” of Wells Fargo in 14 states, he says. “You’re talking about workers who’ve been at the bank 20 or 25 years,” and are now organizing because “it’s gone from a stable, middle-class career to one where workers are starting to have to work a second job.” According to American Banker, 21 more branches are currently in bargaining talks with Wells Fargo, with a 22nd branch due to begin negotiations in February.

In September, a group of Democratic senators wrote to Scharf, accusing Wells Fargo of illegal union-busting. “Workers who elected to unionize cite aggressive sales goals that lead to consumer issues, staffing shortages that leave current employees overburdened, and substandard pay as key reasons for joining a union,” they wrote. “Workers also describe a toxic culture that causes damage to employee wellbeing. Notably, workers report that company management’s practices prevent them from effectively serving customers and small businesses.”

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Sabrina Perez, a senior premier banker at Albuquerque’s El Dorado branch and a bargaining captain for her branch with Wells Fargo Workers United, part of the CWA, says that technology could and should be making workers more productive and the work less difficult. Instead, she says, “the work being automated is doubled or tripled up. The work isn’t being removed, it’s being piled on a smaller number of people.” And because employees at Wells Fargo are all hired on an “at-will” basis, meaning they can be dismissed without cause at any time, the stress and pressure on the people who remain is greater than ever.

“Until society can answer the question of what you do when the whole world is automated, and no one has any money to spend — that question is being outpaced by the implementation of AI,” she says. So in her union’s efforts to negotiate a contract for her branch, “in the short term it’s about implementation that considers how it will affect workers. Make the job easier? Fine? More productive? Fine.” But considering where things seem to be headed, she says “we want these systems to not replace workers, and if it does take away a job, we want that person to still have a place to land.”

Perez points out that this is a career that has historically been a path to a stable, retirement-ready career for those who haven’t been able to obtain a college degree. In addition, she points out, “the vast majority of branch managers and service managers, of bankers and tellers, are female. It’s also heavily represented by minorities. So that push toward automation is going to disproportionately effect marginalized groups, and the money saved is going to accrue up to a lagely white and male leadership at the top of the organization.”

Oliva says that in her role as a teller, in spite of the pressures on her, she still manages to connect with customers. Earlier in the day, she said, a regular client came into the Artesia branch. “She’s putting her son through college, we’re both single parents. Over the weekend, my son got a letter that his poem is going to be published in a book, and she was the first person I wanted to show it to.” She says she wants better for those working in her field, and for the people she serves. “I come into work every day and I bring my best self. An app can’t replace the customer service we provide.”