A longtime Commonwealth Bank employee says she was left “shell-shocked” after discovering she had unknowingly trained the very chatbot that replaced her role.

Kathryn Sullivan, 63, who had worked as a teller for 25 years, revealed that her final duties involved scripting and testing responses for CBA’s Bumblebee AI before being made redundant in July.

“Inadvertently, I was training a chatbot that took my job,” she said at an AI symposium at Parliament House. “We just feel like we were nothing, we were a number.”

The bank, which posted a $10.25 billion profit last year, initially claimed 45 roles were no longer needed. However, after a surge in customer calls exposed flaws in the chatbot system, CBA admitted the rollout had been mishandled and offered affected employees their jobs back. Sullivan declined, saying the new roles lacked the stability of her previous position.

She warned that while AI has clear benefits, stronger safeguards are essential:
“While I embrace the use of AI and I can see a purpose for it in the workplace, there needs to be regulation to prevent it from simply replacing humans.”

The controversy comes as CBA pushes deeper into AI, with CEO Matt Comyn announcing a partnership with OpenAI to combat scams and financial crime. But the bank also faced backlash for hiring 100 new staff in India weeks after cutting more than 300 roles in Australia.

At the symposium, union leaders, policymakers, and economists called for a national agenda on AI to protect workers. ACTU assistant secretary Joseph Mitchell said technology should empower jobs rather than eliminate them, while Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock warned that labour market disruptions are inevitable without investments in retraining.

Assistant Productivity Minister Andrew Leigh stressed that workers’ voices must remain central to AI adoption:
“The Australian ideal of the ‘fair go’ means prosperity is shared. Technology should serve people, not the other way around.”

Labor senator Tim Ayres added that Australia risks depending too heavily on overseas technology instead of shaping its own digital future.