American Express CEO Stephen Squeri said Friday the card company is eliminating 5% of its global workforce.
The firm, which reported third-quarter results earlier Friday, is taking a $336 million restructuring charge in the quarter, Squeri told analysts. Those types of charges typically include employee severance costs.
"We've got good momentum, but to accelerate innovation and win over the next few years, we needed to become [a] more agile and efficient organization," Squeri said.
"We believe this exercise will help us operate and execute more effectively and give us greater capacity to invest in our business priorities," he said.
The restructuring charge was to make American Express "leaner, more agile, and also to prepare for AI," CFO Christophe Le Caillec told CNBC in an interview.
"You don't want to automate processes that are not optimally structured, and so what we're doing here is to reduce layers and increase spans of controls, so that we can automate and take advantage of AI in the coming quarters and the coming years," Le Caillec said.
