Swedbank is laying off around 100 staff in Estonia and the other Baltic states, while the bank says Artificial Intelligence (AI) could lead to further layoffs in future.
Swedbank CEO Olavi Lepp said the company is laying off employees across the entire group, meaning both in the Baltic states and in its home nation, Sweden, with redundancies to total around 500.
"Naturally, in the process, we are also offering existing employees the opportunity to retrain for other roles, but this does not suit everyone and, unfortunately, layoffs are also needed," he said.
Lepp added that Swedbank employs more than 6,000 people in the Baltic states, of whom around 100 have been laid off. The layoffs are linked to a general restructuring of work and investments in development, he went on.
Lepp explained that when the bank experienced a period of very high profitability a few years ago, it decided to invest more in IT development and data modeling, adding some of the aims have been accomplished. "Today, when profitability is at normal levels, we do not need as many people," he said, adding that when development work is not being carried out on a large scale, it makes no sense to retain employees at the same level.
Lepp said in any case there will certainly be jobs in the future that require fewer people. "Then it depends on the company's own sales and strategy what it does next: whether it reduces the number of employees or tries to increase business volumes with its existing workforce."
He added that it is currently unclear whether companies developing AI will meet investors' expectations on profitability. "The big question is that when they become profitable, meaning they start charging the proper price for their services, how much will the software licenses and tokens that we pay AI companies for then cost?"
There are currently more than 90 applications across the Swedbank group in which AI is being tested. Lepp said that so far as Estonia goes, the primary objective is to do more business with the same number of people — increasing business capacity and market share, and in some contexts reducing costs.
In implementing AI, a company needs to carry out a standard cost comparison, and if using tokens is cheaper than employing people, layoffs or retraining will probably follow. "I would say that when it comes to tasks governed by fairly formal logic, the capabilities of artificial intelligence are certainly much greater than those of humans in a great many cases," Lepp went on.
The bigger question, he added, is whether there will be customers from whom profits can be earned. "There have to be people somewhere who consume these services, and they, too, have to earn their income from somewhere," Lepp noted.
Swedbank's net profit in Estonia for the first nine months of this year came to €193 million, €2 million more than in the same period in 2025.
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