Commonwealth Bank of Australia reinforced its position to become an AI-first bank at a world-renowned AI (artificial intelligence) event, H2O World, featuring the latest advancements in machine learning, deep learning and AI solutions.
AI continues to be critical to the bank’s strategy of building tomorrow’s bank today and providing more personal, better experiences.
Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, said: “We want to be doing really high quality work that makes a big difference on a national scale, and be able to attract the best people in market to come and work as part of that team.
“We've used AI in lots of areas, everything from emergency situations in bushfires and floods to give advanced notifications and real time information, through to analysing fuel spending patterns to suggest where the cheapest place is to go to get fuel.
“Anything we do with AI obviously has to be really grounded in what are the benefits that we can deliver for customers and communities. Fundamentally, it starts with high quality data, with the right controls and customer privacy absolutely at the forefront of that.
“We want to be known as an organisation that you can come and work with large data sets on leading edge tools and with some of our partners, while making a real impact for customers.”
The H2O.ai partnership provides CBA with access to exceptional world-leading talent and supports the bank’s strategy towards offering global-best digital experiences and technology, as well as reimaged products and services.
The partnership is also helping the bank to bring the power to its people, without them necessarily needing prior experience in machine learning and data modelling. Ultimately, it means those who serve our customers are empowered to help develop new experiences that use AI in a safe and scalable way, to make a real impact.
Dr Andrew McMullan, CBA’s Chief Data & Analytics Officer said: “Over the last year we have distributed 100 H2O.ai licences throughout the bank across more than 10 business units, with more than 20 uses cases either in production or soon to be.
“This has led to us to now being the first organisation in the world to use Document AI, a ground-breaking new tool that provides significantly enhanced digitised document processing to intelligently understand and interpret the contents of documents. We are using H2O’s capability to transform CBA into an AI-leading bank to make document processing easier, faster and more accurate.
“H2O.ai has enabled us to enhance our Customer Engagement Engine and recommendation engine, with data models in our shopping hub now based on more than a trillion data points per year. H2O’s advanced technology is allowing us to anticipate customer needs to a level not seen before, connecting our customers to a greater variety of offers across merchants of all sizes.
“The H2O platform has also helped boost customer response rates to features within the CommBank app, including with Bill Sense by more than 160 per cent and Benefits finder by more than 120 per cent, helping customers navigate through today’s costs of living challenges.”
CBA Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Dr Andrew McMullan
CBA CEO Matt Comyn and H2O.ai CEO and co-founder Sri Ambati
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CBA Chief Data & Analytics Officer Dr Andrew McMullan
JPG 1.35MBDr McMullan said H2O.ai has helped democratise AI and empower teams across the bank by reducing the traditional barriers to entry.
“Over 1,000 people have been oriented to H2O tools and training, and we have upskilled more than 170 staff to use the H2O platform so they can experiment and build models to tackle business problems. The majority of those 170 users are non-data scientists and this creates an opportunity to scale AI across the organisation.
“The partnership has been a real differentiator for local talent attraction and retention. Only at CBA, can people from Australia and New Zealand work with this incredible capability, directly with the best data scientists in the world.”
H2O.ai Founder and CEO Sri Ambati said: “Our vision is to make every company an AI company and over the last year Commonwealth Bank of Australia has made remarkable progress on its journey to become an AI-first bank, for example showcasing global-leadership with Document AI. It's literally a dream come true for me to co-host these events with a customer like CBA. We've always wanted customers to be the co-creators of H2O World and join us in this movement.
“We look forward to continuing this AI-led focus together and the potential is really big, especially given that whatever we learn today will improve incrementally over time, thanks to AI. This will be fun.”
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