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At a Calgary branch of ATB Financial, one of the bank’s latest recruits educates customers about financial literacy, plays music, challenges them to an impromptu dance-off and, naturally, takes a selfie.

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A four-part look at how robots are changing the way we work. First up, robots aren’t killing jobs, they’re creating new ones and more of them — at least at a GE Aviation plant in Quebec.









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Pepper, the new hire, doesn’t have the most sophisticated skill set at this point — for one thing, she can’t make financial transactions — but she’s made a big leap forward in becoming the first customer service robot in Canadian banking.

At some point, Pepper, developed by SoftBank Robotics Corp., could be programmed to do more complicated tasks. But for now, Edmonton-based ATB Financial is more interested in gauging how people react and figure out which customer situations the robot best fits in.

“This isn’t … the world’s going to be run by robots or something like that,” chief executive Dave Mowat said. “I think it’s trying to find those spots in life, in the customer experience, where people really are looking for just an answer as opposed to a human interaction.”

Humanoid robots such as Pepper won’t be ubiquitous at the Big Five banks anytime soon, but robots of the virtual variety are already hard at work in the financial services world.