IT staff at Australia’s biggest discount department store have become the latest casualties of a company restructure fuelled by the adoption of artificial intelligence and outsourcing.
Kmart has quietly shed a number of roles from its tech department in the past week, in a bid to “simplify ways of working” and “keep prices low for customers”.
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Management declined to confirm exactly how many roles were affected, but insisted store-based roles would not be impacted.
In a statement to news.com.au, a Kmart spokesman said the retail giant was regularly reviewing its business structure and “how work gets done” to ensure its resources and capabilities focused on its priorities and changing customer needs.
“As part of the normal course of managing the business, Kmart Group is always looking for ways to strengthen its operations, simplify ways of working and manage costs so it can continue to keep prices low for customers,” he said.
“The recent changes are part of this ongoing business as usual and do not relate to store-based roles.
“Consistent with our approach in such situations, Kmart is providing assistance to impacted team members including redeployment opportunities.”
The move comes just two months after the department store publicly celebrated the success of its AI recruitment chatbot, which screens hundreds of thousands of prospective employees each year, saving the company $6 million.
The Wesfarmers-owned retailer replaced human applicant screening with the tool across more than 450 stores, reducing the duration of the hiring process from 44 days to 11.8 days.
Kmart usually receives 600,000 applications per year, with human resources previously only capable of screening a fraction of them.
At the time of the announcement, Kmart chief people and corporate affairs officer Tristram Gray said human recruiters would still monitor the AI tool.
“Overall, Kmart Group continues to grow and invest in the areas that matter most to customers and as a result employs more people today than we did a year ago,” the Kmart spokesman said.
Kmart joins major firms including WiseTech, Telstra and Atlassian in slashing its tech staff in favour of leaner, AI-assisted workflows this year.
In February, logistics software WiseTech Global announced it was planning to scrap about 2000 jobs over the next 18 months, with some of its teams to be cut in half with redundancies impacting about 29 per cent of staff across 40 countries.
That same month it was revealed more than 200 Telstra jobs would go, following a joint venture between the telco and technology consultancy Accenture.
While some of these jobs were taken over by AI, others were outsourced to India.
Meanwhile, Sydney-headquartered tech giant Atlassian shared in March it would axe about 1600 jobs as it responds to the “AI era”, with 480 of those roles here in Australia.
And the job cuts to aren’t expected to end there, with the Finance Sector Union (FSU) releasing a statement on Wednesday anticipating some Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) staff would face “a bleak Christmas” after learning their jobs will be gone by year’s end.
This move is also due to operational changes, with CBA citing customer needs as driving the evolution.
The latest restructuring will affect 232 staff across several divisions, with NSW tech staff bearing the brunt of it.
While job loss anxiety is high across the tech sector, universities have noticed a decline in ICT-related course enrolments, with just 2.9 per cent of new students opting to study the field this year.