CBA just leapt forward in the big four banks AI race

The nation’s largest bank has just leapfrogged its big four competitors as it implemented some of the most powerful AI tools in the region.

CBA chief data and analytics officer Andrew McMullan.

More than 50,000 staff at Australia’s largest bank have just been given access to some of the most powerful artificial intelligence-powered tools in the region.

It arrives as the race to source and implement AI tools in the financial services sector is heating up, with the nation’s biggest banks forking out massive sums to be the first and most powerful.

Commonwealth Bank became AWS’s first Australian customer to launch its P5s, which leverage NVIDIA chips to perform AI-powered tasks at a rate that’s four times faster and 40 per cent more efficient than its previous set up.

CBA describes the launch of the new products as an AI factory – a term used not to describe a physical space, but rather the hypothetical power access to such compute power can provide.

CBA chief data analytics officer Andrew McMullan told The Australian he expected to see a return on the investment in a little under 12 months. “We now have the largest AI Factory in CBA’s history, and that means everyone in the organisation can use AI and generative AI in the work that they do,” he said.

With access to the new chips, CBA staff will test and develop new AI-powered products at speeds unseen in Australia.

The new compute power was also important for its customers; Dr McMullan said it would help improve and scale the speed of the company’s fraud products.

CBA chief data & analytics officer Andrew McMullan.

“The AI models we run to protect our customers are now running five times faster,” he said.

Another software service that detects fraud in documentation is now running 20 times faster.

Dr McMullan said it was crucial that banks were ahead of the curve with technology development. “The technology is advancing quickly, and we need the right infrastructure in place to support our strategic goal of building tomorrow’s bank today for the benefit of our customers,” he said.

“The AI Factory will ensure that we are properly set up to leverage this emerging technology effectively. “

Powering CBA’s AI ambitions is US cloud giant AWS, which has been CBA’s primary cloud provider for a little over a decade. “In addition to that, we’re doing all of our data platform and AI work in the AWS ecosystem,” Dr McCullan said.

AWS head of financial services Jamie Simon said CBA would also see a cost benefit from the investment, which “draws a much lower energy consumption”. “There’s a lot of compute required to CBA and these high-performance instances, so this will help manage the cost to, say, 40 per cent more price performant than previous generation GPUs (graphics processing units),” he said.

CBA is expecting a five times return on its latest investment in the AWS and NVIDIA technology, and Dr McMullan said he expected zero hiccups and ... a return on the investment within as little as 12 months.

CBA’s investment arrives after ANZ launched an “AI Immersion Centre” in Melbourne, a physical space where the company’s 3000 executive, management and senior staff would be sent for training.

Powering ANZ’s new centre is Microsoft, with each of the 3000 senior staffers given a licence for Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Originally published as CBA just leapt forward in the big four banks AI race