Société Générale Targets Up to €600M in AI Cost Savings

French bank Société Générale announced that expanding its deployment of artificial intelligence, including Anthropic's Claude models, could yield between €500 million and €600 million in total cost savings. The bank has already outlined concrete plans to secure approximately €350 million of those savings by 2029. This highlights a growing movement among major financial institutions to transition AI from small-scale pilots into core operational drivers for enterprise efficiency. It also reinforces broader banking trends in Europe, where analysts project AI automation could potentially reduce industry workforce levels by up to 20%. Société Générale plans to deploy AI across four primary use cases: automated report generation, KPI monitoring, reducing software development costs, and augmenting customer advisory services. The AI rollout is tied to CEO Slawomir Krupa's broader cost-cutting strategy, which will also include job cuts.