Thousands of NAB staff will begin being replaced by technology this week.

Six-thousand retrenched National Australia Bank (NAB) employees are leaving from the bank's Melbourne head office, with software increasingly performing previously human tasks.

The rise of digital replacement is happening across the financial sectors, with banks, financial institutions, accounting and law firms turning to tech-based solutions.

NAB announced it is sacking one in every five members of its workforce last November.

Experts say that for about 60 per cent of jobs, 30 per cent of the activities are automatable.

NAB chief executive officer Andrew Thorburn says things are changing.

“I think this is one of the big issues in Australia for the next five to 10 years: the new nature of work [is] more casual,” he said.

“The internet is changing things. I think overall that's very good for people, but there's a huge shift in the type of work that's happened in Australia for the last 30 to 40 years.

“But with the internet, with digital business, [it's a] huge transformation.”

Dr Claire Mason, senior social scientist at CSIRO's Data61, says there is still a role for old-fashioned “people skills”.

“It makes sense when you think about it because technology essentially automates routine, rule-based kind of tasks,” she told the ABC.

“But it still can't — and we don't expect that it will be able to in the medium term — do human functions like display empathy, make somebody feel understood, or know how to define a really complex fuzzy kind of problem.”