The law firm Clifford Chance is reducing the number of business services staff at its London base by 10%, with the increased use of artificial intelligence a factor behind the decision.
The head of PwC has also indicated that AI may lead to fewer workers being hired at the accountancy and consulting group.
Clifford Chance, one of the largest international law firms, is making about 50 roles redundant in areas such as finance, HR and IT with role changes for up to 35 other jobs, according to the Financial Times which first reported the cuts.
Greater use of AI and reduced demand for some business services are behind the cuts, the FT report said, as well as more work being done at offices outside Clifford Chance’s main UK-US operations in countries like Poland and India.
A spokesperson for Clifford Chance said: “In line with our strategy to strengthen our operations, we can confirm we are proposing changes to some of our London-based business professional functions.
“The proposed changes could see the creation of new roles, changes to the scope of roles, revised team structures and in some cases a reduction in roles.”
White-collar, or office-based jobs, are commonly cited as being vulnerable to advances in AI, the term for computer systems that perform cognitive tasks typically associated with human intelligence.
AI is able to help employees perform some tasks faster – such as coding, research, scheduling meetings and reviewing contracts – and experts believe companies will consider banking those productivity gains by hiring fewer people, or cutting staff numbers as systems become capable of handling certain tasks autonomously.
Four in 10 (41%) bosses told a recent survey of 850 business leaders that AI was allowing them to cut the number of employees. The British Standards Institution poll spanned seven countries: the UK, the US, France, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.
The global chairman of PwC, Mohamed Kande, said the firm would no longer be hiring 100,000 people over a five-year period – a target set in 2021 – due to the advent of AI, indicating that entry-level jobs could be affected.
“When we made the plans to hire that many people, the world looked very, very different,” he told the BBC. “Now we have artificial intelligence. We want to hire, but I don’t know if it’s going to be the same level of people that we hire – it will be a different set of people.”
However, Kande added that PwC was struggling to recruit AI specialists. “We are looking for hundreds and hundreds of engineers today to help us drive our AI agenda, but we just cannot find them,” he said.
The UK head of PwC said in September that AI was “certainly reshaping roles” but that a drop in graduate recruitment at the firm this year was due to a slowdown in economic activity.