294. The Week

The Royal Bank of Canada has approximately 95,000 employees. The bank's CEO is Dave McKay. Dave McKay announced recently that artificial intelligence now produces compliance reports in approximately four seconds. The reports previously took a week to produce. This is being described as an improvement.

A week is forty hours of work. Or, in the case of someone compiling a compliance report, it is forty hours of work plus an indeterminate number of hours confirming with a colleague, plus the time the colleague takes to get back because they are also working on a compliance report, plus some additional time to confirm that the first confirmation was correct, because compliance is the kind of job where you confirm confirmations.

Four seconds is four seconds.

(I want to be clear about what "compliance report" means here. A compliance report is a document that tells regulators whether a bank is following the rules. Banks are required to follow the rules. The report is proof that they are following the rules. Someone spent a week producing this proof. That someone is now watching AI produce it in four seconds while they are still sitting at their desk at the Royal Bank of Canada.)

Dave McKay did not say what those people would do with the rest of their week. He said it was an improvement. This is, by certain measures, accurate. The report takes four seconds. The week is now free.

The bank has 95,000 employees. This figure has not changed since Dave McKay made this announcement. What has changed is how long one of the things those employees were doing takes to do. There is not yet a widely agreed-upon word for what an employee does during the part of the week that used to be a compliance report and is now four seconds. This is probably because the vocabulary develops after the situation.

Dave McKay called it a transformation. He did not specify what was being transformed into what. In banking, this level of vagueness is technically called a press release.

The week is still seven days. The report is four seconds. The 95,000 employees are, as far as anyone can tell, still there. The math on this is not working out the way it usually does when something takes much less time than it used to, but the Royal Bank of Canada has not published any guidance on the math yet.

The week continues.