On July 23, Centrica announced it is axing another 1,300 call centre positions, with CEO Chris O'Shea pointing to consumer preference data as justification: most British Gas customers, the company says, would rather deal with a chatbot than pick up the phone to a human. That figure lands on top of 500 customer service roles already cut in June across various UK sites. Total job losses in roughly two months: 1,800.

The GMB union isn't buying the customer-experience framing. Its public criticism frames the move as a straightforward profit play dressed in the language of convenience. Centrica did report rising retail profits in the same period, even as its customer base shrank, which gives the union's argument some footing.

A pattern already familiar in tech and crypto

Platforms like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken have leaned on automated ticketing and AI-assisted responses for years, precisely because human support at scale is expensive and slow. Coinbase's recent push into AI agent payments shows how far that logic can extend, well beyond support queues and into core business infrastructure. The Centrica case is notable mainly because it makes the headcount math explicit in a regulated, consumer-facing utility, not a crypto-native startup that can move fast without much scrutiny.

There is a small historical footnote worth mentioning. Back in 2018, Centrica partnered with LO3 Energy to pilot peer-to-peer energy trading on distributed ledger technology. That project went quiet. Blockchain got the exploratory pilot; AI got the actual budget and the workforce reduction.

The regulatory question hanging over all of this is whether governments will respond with automation taxes, mandatory retraining requirements, or deployment restrictions on AI in customer-facing roles. Any of those outcomes would reshape operating costs for tech companies and crypto exchanges just as much as for a British utility. The GMB's pushback on Centrica may be an early signal of how loud that pressure gets.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.