Inside AI with chiefs at Atlassian, CBA and Telstra

Meet your new colleague, an AI-powered virtual teammate. By the end of this year Australian AI gurus predict most companies will have one such worker in their office or at least their own version of ChatGPT.

Telstra’s Kim Krogh Andersen (left), Atlassian’s Sherif Mansour (top) and CBA’s Andrew McMullan.

Artificial intelligence has well and truly entered Australian schools, and if you’re anything like Sherif Mansour, you’re better placed than most to deal with questions that follow.

Just last week Mr Mansour, Atlassian’s head of AI, was fielding questions from his primary school-aged son.

“No joke, last night my 10-year-old son came back from school and told me he used AI to generate images for a scratch game … They’re now coding at school,” he said.

Initially puzzled with how to explain it, Mr Mansour then asked his son to finish the sentence “the cat sat on the…”.

“Mat,” his son replied.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve heard it a thousand times before.”

“That’s how AI works. It just learns from a lot of knowledge whether it be text, image, audio, video and data,” Mr Mansour told him. “He kind of got it.”

The young father, a computer science graduate from the University of Wollongong, is one of dozens of Australians who have been tasked with managing the development of one of the fastest growing technologies in the world.

Atlassian head of AI Sherif Mansour.

It’s a role Mr Mansour kicked off in November 2022, after 13 years with the company in a role known as distinguished product manager, that’s one he said makes him feel as if he “should stroke a moustache when I say that”. Prior to that he had been a developer at the nation’s second largest telco Optus and had helped the company on-board Atlassian’s early software.

How the technology has changed his day to day role is he now uses AI to summarise the data he receives.

“It is super useful in showing me perspectives I hadn’t considered and asking hard questions and all that kind of stuff. So, if you like, a sparring partner for my day-to-day work,” he said.

Mr Mansour predicts that by the end of this year most Australians will have a virtual teammate powered by AI in their company.

“The big one for me is seeing the explosion of virtual teammates or agents,” he said.” How teams work every day is going to transform.”

Andrew McMullan, CBA

At the nation’s largest bank, Andrew McMullan, takes the steer on AI. Mr McMullan, originally from Ireland, studied maths and statistics and has a PHD in machine learning from the University of Glasgow.

When it comes to explaining AI to friends and colleagues, Mr McMullan uses the example of navigation.

“When you get in your car today, everyone has a satnav and that’s all powered by artificial intelligence and satellites that help people simply get to where they need to go,” he said.

CBA chief data and analytics officer Andrew McMullan.

On how his role had changed due to AI, Mr McMullan said it had a major impact on how the bank worked with customers.

“If you’re a customer of ours and you go into the app, the content and images that we use in there have now been generated by generative AI,” he said.

“We are experimenting with different customers’ personalities and seeing what customers like to engage with.”

By the end of this year, Mr McMullan expects almost every organisation will have or be building its own version of ChatGPT.

“Every organisation will start to build those experiences for customers. Australians want to engage with things now by typing or spoken language,” he said.

One example he gave was on the CBA app which now allowed customers to ask how much they spent on coffee last month or how much of a deposit they would need to buy a house in a certain area.

Kim Krogh Andersen, Telstra

At the nation’s largest telco, the head of AI is a former Danish Army Officer who joined the telco in 2020.

Kim Krogh Andersen is Telstra’s product and technology executive. His view on AI is that “the technology doesn’t need a lot of support to inspire.”

Telstra product and technology group executive Kim Krogh Andersen.

How the technology has changed Telstra is by putting access to the technology into the palms of staff with everyone given access to AI via Bing’s enterprise product. “Every employee now has access to generative AI at hand,” he said.

The company had also invested in AI workshops and programs, taking team members to Microsoft, AWS and Nvidia to see first-hand how the technology was being used and hopefully inspire ideas for the Telco.

By the end of this year, AI will make all tasks we better as it provides suggestions in real time, Mr Andersen said.

“I think it will redefine how we do business, period. Everything we do will be a percentage better,” he said.

One example he gave was the way he now writes emails. “Now my replies are a little bit longer and a little bit nicer because I used Microsoft 360 co-pilot,” he said, adding his colleagues had already begun to notice.

More from this series: Meet the AI chiefs ahead in the game