Allianz to Cut Up to 1,800 Jobs in Europe, Citing AI

Allianz Partners, the travel insurance and assistance company owned by German insurer Allianz, announced on Tuesday evening in Munich that it plans to cut between 1,500 and 1,800 jobs across Europe. The company directly links the decision to the rollout of its own artificial intelligence system, which is set to take over routine customer phone inquiries.

The decision was announced by Allianz Partners CEO Tomas Kunzmann at an industry event in Munich. According to him, talks with works council representatives had already been underway for six months before the company decided to make the plan official.

Over the past six months we have been negotiating with our colleagues on the works councils - Tomas Kunzmann, CEO of Allianz Partners

What AI Will Replace

The cuts will hit call center staff handling simple matters such as address changes or checking the status of a claim. Allianz Partners has built its own AI-based assistant capable of holding hundreds of phone conversations simultaneously in more than twenty languages. More complex cases will still be passed on to human staff.

The company said the layoffs will be carried out mainly through severance agreements, early retirement and other forms of voluntary departure rather than through collective dismissals in the strict sense. Voluntary departure offers have already been sent to employees in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries.

Scale Across the Insurance Industry

Allianz Partners is not an isolated case in the financial sector. Rival Munich Re, through its primary insurance unit ERGO, is cutting around a thousand jobs in Germany over the same period, partly for the same reason: the growing use of artificial intelligence in customer service. Analysts at Bloomberg Economics estimate that about 27 percent of workers in developed economies will feel a significant impact from AI-driven automation.

The insurance and financial sector is among the most exposed to this kind of change, since much of the work involves processing structured requests and data, exactly the type of task current language models handle best. Call centers are one of the first corporate areas where companies are moving to substantial job cuts rather than just pilot projects.

What It Means for Poland

Allianz operates in Poland as one of the larger insurers on the market, though the announcement currently concerns Allianz Partners' structures in Western Europe and does not specify whether or to what extent it will affect the Polish branch. For Polish employees in the insurance and financial sector, though, it is a warning sign that customer service automation is no longer theoretical and is starting to translate into concrete job cuts at large international players.

For financial services companies in Poland, the Allianz Partners case could serve as a reference point when planning their own AI deployments in customer service, both in terms of the potential scale of savings and the need to conduct similar negotiations with employee representatives.

The company said the process of change will continue over the coming months, with decisions on the exact number and location of eliminated positions to be made as talks continue with works councils in individual countries.

Sources: Insurance Journal (insurancejournal.com), Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com), heise online (heise.de)