Financial services employees craving generative AI for efficiency boost

Workers across superannuation and investments want access to generative AI tools to boost efficiency and productivity, tech chiefs in those sectors say.

CBA chief information officer Gavin Munroe speaking with Microsoft's VP of cloud and AI commercial marketing Alysa Taylor, at a Microsoft conference in Sydney.

Financial services workers are increasingly demanding access to generative AI tools to boost efficiency and productivity, tech chiefs at some of the nation’s largest banks and funds say.

Speaking at a Microsoft conference on Wednesday, Mike Backeberg, AustralianSuper chief technology officer, said that soon after generative AI was revealed to the world late in 2022, he started getting daily messages about it.

“I think for three months every day I’d get an email from somebody inside the organisation saying what are you doing? When are we going to get it? What’s happening?” he said.

“Our investments department is particularly interested in what AI will do globally, how it will transform industries (and) where are the opportunities for efficiency?

That group of people is “highly connected to what’s going on in the innovation space, and they are bringing those insights back into the organisation.”

The $300bn fund is now embracing AI and exploring ways to use the technology, including using it to mine valuable, but unstructured, intelligence and data sourced from the thousands of companies in which it invests.

It is developing an AI policy and is using generative AI to increase engineering capability.

At the nation’s largest lender, Commonwealth Bank first trialled Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot among 300 employees. The bank then ran a survey among the group, where 75 per cent said they would rather a licence for the generative AI tool than a monthly $50 lunch coupon. “Fifty per cent of them said they made them more creative,” said CBA chief information officer Gavin Munroe.

At the conference, Microsoft showcased its generative AI product range, including its Microsoft Copilot chatbot and its AI-powered developer platform GitHub. It said Australian businesses already using the products were reaping a return of 3.66 times for every dollar they spent.

Jeroen Buwulda, an executive at Colonial First State in charge of technology and operations, said investment in generative AI technology was “almost non-discretionary”. “There’s a huge demand for it with our staff,” he said. “We believe we need to get this into the organisation.”

Mr Buwulda said CFS, which is jointly owned by private equity firm KKR and CBA, was trialling generative AI in a “safe environment” to understand “what this could do”, but there were “still a lot of unknowns around this technology”.

CFS was using AI tools to perform sentiment analysis on recordings of customer calls and a number of employees were piloting the technology.

“We started with some experiments around augmenting staff capabilities to make them more productive,” he said, and wants to “expose” some of those capabilities in an assisted way to its members and advisers too.

“We are a little far off from doing it in an unassisted way,” he said, adding that could potentially be the final stage of adoption. But in the meantime, employees had to be comfortable using the technology first.

But Mr Backeberg warned generative AI is not the solution for all problems and it was important employees had a clear idea of what it was they wanted to achieve with it, and where it could be used effectively.

“The challenge that we have to deal with literally on a weekly basis is having to go to talk to people in the organisation about what AI is and how we are going to use it. The expectation that we are almost going to stop doing other things and only invest in generative AI is not true.”