How Matt Comyn is rebuilding Australia’s biggest bank with AI (and what it means for you)

The CBA boss says companies that are ‘late or reluctant adopters’ of AI will struggle to compete. Here are his top tips on how to get more workers using the technology and seize the boom.

CBA boss Matt Comyn says ‘the best way to prepare for the future is to be part of the future’.

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn says Australian companies need to embrace the artificial intelligence revolution, warning those who are “late or reluctant adopters” will struggle to compete.

CBA has become Australia’s biggest bank, worth $303.06bn, helped by superior technology to NAB, ANZ and Westpac. It has been investing heavily in AI, with Mr Comyn cultivating relationships with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Microsoft boss Satya Nadella.

Mr Comyn said the pace of change from the AI boom was “frankly more significant than I’ve seen”, prompting CBA to establish a tech hub in Seattle to upskill its staff to maintain its competitive edge. He has also overseen a Herculian feat of migrating CBA’s data to the Amazon Web Services’s cloud within 18 months, allowing to harness AI to make banking more personalised for customers and less stressful when trying to get assistance from various departments, whether than be online, at a branch or calling its support centre.

But most Australian companies are reluctant to adopt AI at scale, becoming bogged down in pilot studies as executives struggle to quantify a return on investment or seek assurances around privacy and data security.

“The reality is, we’re all facing uncertainty in our roles in different, but I’m absolutely convinced that the best way to prepare for the future is to be part of the future – to have the agency and engagement, rather than being sort of a reluctant or a late adopter,” Mr Comyn told Amazon Web Services’ Summit in Sydney.

“I think the production function around AI will make it very difficult for both individuals and firms to be late and then try to catch up.

“Frankly, I think the rate of change that’s possible at the moment is much more significant than I’ve seen in the past.”

To increase adoption, Mr Comyn said executives needed to be more hands on to set an example and deliver on AI’s productivity benefits.

“There are a number of lessons for us, one of which was how much sort of diffusion there is inside organisations and how much effort it takes actually to get people using tools – even in areas which I think made the clearest case.

“In engineering … it’s not like 20 per cent more productive. You can be like 400 per cent more productive, but 100 per cent of engineers don’t automatically adopt some of the tooling.

“My personal view is the leader of the future, irrespective of industry and domain, needs to be very hands on in a number of ways, including with a lot of the tools that available now. Trying to people to use them both personally and professionally, I think that actually helps.”

Rianne Van Veldhuizen.

AWS Australia vice president and managing director Rianne Van Veldhuizen said larger companies needed to think bigger about AI.

“We have asked, in this case with this customer … to pick one use case that is a needle mover that will give you a visible impact that they could start in the next eight weeks,” Ms Van Veldhuizen said.

“That customer had a long list of potential use cases then got sort of stuck on which one to prioritise and maybe started with low-hanging fruit, saying ‘oh, those are the easy ones’.

“But then what is the real impact? Maybe a nice toy at times? They haven’t looked at scale. If we would approach this just from a technology point of view, it would be a massive mistake. This is as much of a people and culture change management.”

CBA has completed migrating its data platform to AWS cloud to accelerate its adoption of AI, which is expected to make it easier for customers to get assistance across various departments from online to branch and customer contact centre – what AWS director of financial services Jamie Simon said could normally be a cumbersome experience.

“A big focus is how do you create that more seamless flow of customer data, so that you understand, as a bank, the entirety of your relationship with that customer,” Mr Simon said.

“You can be far more contextually aware in how you serve them and get ahead of their needs as well, so you’re not just responding to them, you’re proactively taking them to recommendations.”

CBA’s migration took about 18 months, including initial planning, making it one of the fastest in the Southern Hemisphere. Terri Sutherland, the bank’s lead for data platforms, said: “Migrating our data to the cloud is a significant milestone”.

“Every day, we’re using AI to make around 55 million decisions intended to benefit our customers and our people,” Ms Sutherland said.,

“We have over 2000 AI models feeding on approximately 157 billion data points – making CBA one of the largest corporate users of AI in the country. This initiative not only enhances our data capabilities but also supports our strategic priority to deliver global best digital experiences and technology for our customers.”

Financial services have normally been concerned about decommissioning legacy systems, given some are more than 40 years old and the people who wrote the initial code are no longer around. But AWS platform can understand that original code and rewrite it.

Amazon is using its own experience to ease customer concerns. It has migrated tens of thousands of production applications from Java 8 or 11 to Java 17, which it says represents a saving of more than 4500 years of development work and $260m dollars in annual cost savings.

While other big Australian companies are not as advanced as CBA in the adoption of AI, AWS research shows 81 per cent of start-ups are leveraging the technology.

To spur growth, AWS is establishing a new flagship program called AI Spring Australia, aimed at helping accelerate and AI adoption across enterprises.

Ms Van Veldhuizen said organisations that adopted generative AI could contribute as much as $15bn annually to the Australian economy by 2030, citing Goldman Sachs data.

The Spring program will leverage AWS’s infrastructure, AI tools and services, and built-in security and guardrails to grow capability among Australia’s workforce.

“AI Spring is a program that we’ve launched to make sure that our customers and partners get the most out of the AI programs that we have out there,” Ms Van Veldhuizen said.

AWS has also reopened its Generative AI Accelerator program that boasts alumni including Leonardo AI, which developed Australia’s homegrown artificial intelligence model before Canva acquired the company.

“They built the whole business around it. But if you think about scale, that in itself, has already been played over half a billion times,” Ms Van Veldhuizen said.

“So we’re talking not small initiatives here. We’re talking about initiatives where these ambitions are big. It may start small, but they definitely have an impact and skill, and that’s why that program is again here.”

Originally published as How Matt Comyn is rebuilding Australia’s biggest bank with AI (and what it means for you)