July 24, 2026
British Gas Cuts 1,300 Contact Centre Jobs With the Spectre of AI Hanging Over Them
Centrica has confirmed it’s cutting around 1,300 jobs with British Gas, roughly 14% of the workforce in its customer operations arm. Last month, when 500 of those roles were first announced, the company insisted AI had nothing to do with it. This week, in confirming the remaining 800, it used the new phrase “targeted deployment of AI tools” in the same breath as the cuts, without directly saying one caused the other.
The Job Cuts, and the Row Over Why
The total spans customer service teams in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leicester, Stockport and Leeds. It will play out over roughly two years, and some roles will be left unfilled as people leave anyway. The rest will transpire through redundancy. The trade union GMB has argued from the start that the whole 1,300 amounts to jobs handed to chatbots. Centrica’s position is more layered than that. It says the 500 roles announced last month reflect fewer people calling in, not automation. Centrica has, for the first time, explicitly named AI tools in the same breath as this round of cuts. However, it hasn’t expressly said AI caused the 800 job losses.
Chief Executive Chris O’Shea drew that distinction himself on this week’s results call:
“AI isn’t driving these particular job reductions; that’s mainly due to changing customer behaviour. What we’re seeing just now is over 90% of our customers actually use digital channels in the first instance, and we’ve seen a 20% reduction in customer calls.”
GMB National Secretary Charlotte Brumpton-Childs isn’t inclined to draw the same distinction:
“It’s an absolute disgrace British Gas is slashing hundreds of human jobs and giving them to chatbots. These staff are massively overworked and underpaid, yet do their level best to keep customers happy.”
It’s a version of the argument CXM has tracked across the sector all year. Sky put 2,000 contact centre jobs at risk under similar cover last year. Last month, Verizon’s CEO predicted AI will replace “a large percentage” of the company’s customer service work. The honest answer to whether AI is coming for contact centre roles in a holistic sense has mostly been more complicated than either side admits, albeit that’s hardly comfort to the thousands of people who will lose their jobs. Centrica splitting its own explanation in two, depending on the 500 or 800 jobs, is a candid illustration of that complexity.
Reading the Results (and the AI Room) Alongside the Redundancies
The cuts arrived alongside half-year numbers that weren’t especially cheerful. Adjusted EBITDA fell 18% to £737 million, down from £900 million a year earlier. Adjusted operating profit slipped to £497 million from £549 million. Shares dropped as much as 10% on the day. Centrica raised its dividend anyway, up 9.3% to 2.0p a share. This is a fairly transparent signpost to shareholders that the underlying business is sound, even if this half wasn’t its best.
The more compelling wrinkle sits in the trading arm. Centrica now expects around £200–250 million from its optimisation division next year. This is well under the roughly £298 million analysts at RBC had pencilled in. Retail profits, by contrast, actually rose slightly to £346 million, even as domestic customer numbers slipped to 7.45 million from 7.5 million. This is margin over volume, in other words, which is roughly the same logic behind the job cuts.
What it Actually Means if you Ring British Gas
For the millions of households Centrica serves, the practical change has probably already happened without anyone announcing it. Over nine in ten enquiries now go through the app, website, chatbot or WhatsApp rather than a phone call.
However, the challenge isn’t the majority who are happy self-serving. There is a minority of others who will be daunted, including older customers, people in financial difficulty, and anyone whose situation doesn’t fit neatly into a chatbot’s decision tree. Centrica insists that group will still reach a person.
Whether that holds true under a smaller customer operations team will be far more likely to show up in complaints data rather than results calls. Whether the 49% of customer service roles Forrester expects to disappear industry-wide by 2030 ends up looking optimistic or conservative once a few more companies follow Centrica’s lead remains to be seen.
