Commonwealth Bank on Wednesday held a briefing it called ‘Reimagining Banking’ – of course, CEO Matt Comyn and his exec team spent a lot of time talking about AI. But that came with a reminder that CommBank has been doing AI for a while.
The focus of the briefing was the release of the CommBank App 5.0. CBA executive general manager of ‘digital and customer’ Meg Bonington walked through what’s new in the CommBank app, repeating again what the bank has been saying for years: That app experience expectations are lifting, particularly in the era of social media. (Hopefully, this doesn’t mean the bank is going to be integrating vertical video soon, please no).
Anyway, some new bank app things include ‘personalisation’, which comes through via navigation, as well as the ability to drag-and-drop which options you want first, there’s also a new search feature, and a content library.
This is cool, but the overarching message was clear: All of this is driven by AI.
“I suspect that many of you here today have heard more about AI in the last six months than you have done in the previous decade prior to the unveiling of ChatGPT … ChatGPT certainly signals the next phase of AI innovation and capability. But here at CBA, we’ve actually had AI as a core strategic focus area for a number of years,” CommBank chief data and analytics officer Andrew McMullan said.
He started with another reminder that CBA was doing AI first – talking about that time the yellow bank signed up to the Australian government’s responsible AI pledge (the responsible AI pledge saw CBA, along with NAB, Telstra, and Microsoft, voluntarily trial a series of eight AI principles that focused on ethical uses). That was back in 2019.
“We’ve taken those principles, created our own CBA AI policies and frameworks, and we use that to make sure that we’re safely and securely deploying AI across the organisation every day,” McMullan said.
Another example of AI McMullan needs everyone to know about is the bank’s Customer Engagement Engine, which was first conceived in 2016. In 2019, I attended a briefing with McMullan where he walked media through how the bank was using AI and machine learning – today, he said it’s been something CommBank has believed in and invested in so much that it’s now become something so engrained in everyday service delivery.
“Today, over 1,000 machine learning models running in real time over 157 billion data points – it’s an incredible system that we use to better understand and serve our customers across all the channels,” he said, adding the engine makes 53 million decisions every day.
Some highlights include stopping fraud and investment scams with skyrocketing results. But that’s not what you came here for. You want to know about Gen.ai.
McMullan explained that via a partnership (one it’s had for about 18 months) with H20.ai, the bank has injected 49 large language models into its data platform to “improve the service experience for customers”. The first use case is with the company’s own call centre team.
Currently, CBA call centre staff have access to a document repository known as iSource. iSource holds 4,500 documents that staff use to find answers to customer questions.
So, CommBank built Gen.ai – essentially a ChatGPT conversational AI tool that uses the bank’s own information to find the answer.
The call centre team have been piloting the tech already, using it for questions such as, “I have a customer who is not an Australian citizen, who wants to apply for a personal loan, how can I tell if they are eligible?” Gen.ai will then answer that, allowing the call centre staff member to continue this conversation with more questions and the AI will know it’s a continuation, not a new question.
Gen.ai is hosted on CommBank infrastructure and the AI tool was taught using the bank’s own data.
“There are so many use cases of AI across the group and this is just the start,” McMullan said.
The takeaway CBA wants to leave you with is this: It’s been doing AI since before it was cool and it’s got a lot of AI-enabled tools and features to unleash onto its staff and customers.