Know Your Customer, Lose Your Job

Norway's largest bank announced this week it's cutting about 400 full-time positions. DNB says AI agents now do a lot of the work, specifically checking customer data, KYC (Know Your Customer), and coding. The CEO says the bank is adapting to "a new reality."

The stock went up about one percent. Somebody did the math.

I have done KYC in Norway. As a foreigner, opening a bank account here was less a form and more a pilgrimage. Now I get to prove I exist to an agent that isn't entirely sure it exists either.

E24 asked DNB if this means a cheaper bank or lower rates for customers. DNB didn't answer. They said simpler, faster, better. So the savings are going somewhere, and it isn't your mortgage. You get the bot.

Nobody says "transform" anymore

Remember 2023? Every CEO on every stage said AI would transform their business. You couldn't get through a panel without it.

I don't hear it anymore. My theory: comms got to them. "Transform" was always a headcount number wearing a nicer blazer, and once everyone figured that out, the word became a liability. Now it's "efficiency gains." It's "a new reality." DNB isn't even offering severance packages. It's offering a virkemiddelpakke, which a spokesperson clarified to E24 means exactly the same thing. Somebody got paid to pick that word. That person's job is probably safe.

And DNB is the loud version. The quiet version doesn't need a stock exchange notice. Nobody gets fired. Somebody leaves a job, and the job ad for a replacement just never goes up. The remaining team gets a Claude login and a slightly heavier Monday. Multiply that by every company in the country. That's the real number, and nobody publishes it.

The deputy head of Finansforbundet, the finance workers' union, warned against treating AI as a law of nature that automatically means fewer people. He's right that it's a choice. He's wrong that anyone will choose differently.

The ghosts

Somewhere in the last year I started seeing ghosts. The polite kind, still showing up to work, still billing their hours, still selling me software on a monthly subscription.

Turns out some people's jobs are like 80 percent copy-paste. Some are billing by the hour to make a very small change to a file. There's a guy at the airport whose whole job is pointing at the self-service bag drop. I look at them and I can't help thinking that won't exist for long.

Software is worse. Every renewal email I receive now gets the same thought: do I actually need this, or do I build it this weekend with Claude Code?

So I'm not just seeing ghosts. I'm making them.

The hardest it will ever be

If this is all so obvious, why does it feel slow?

Because today's AI tools are the hardest to use they will ever be. To do anything real I'm wiring up MCP servers, fighting config files, reading terminal errors at midnight. Most people bounce off that, which is completely reasonable. That friction is the only thing holding the gap open between power users and everyone else.

It only goes one direction. Every month the setup gets shorter. Eventually it's a button. DNB just did the hard version first, with money and patience, and cut one in five roles in a 2,000-person division. Everyone else gets the easy version later.

When it's a button, the ghosts all show up at once.

Nobody knows

Here's the part that keeps me up. The Norwegian state owns 34 percent of DNB. So the government that needs those 400 salaries paying income tax also gets a slightly bigger dividend for not having them. Nobody planned that. Nobody's in charge of it. It just happens, one empty desk at a time.

We're at the very beginning, and nobody knows where it goes. Not the banks, not the unions, not the people building the models. Definitely not me.

In The Sixth Sense, there's one rule and one hell of a twist. The ghosts don't know they're ghosts. They go to work. They do the job. They wonder why nobody quite looks at them anymore.

Bruce Willis didn't know either.