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As part of its commitment to empower its 7,800+ engineers through its AI Powered Engineering program, CommBank has launched an Agentic Engineering Framework and human supervised automated coding agent called “Project Coral.” 

Designed and built by a team of CommBank engineers, Project Coral systematically and autonomously identifies and suggest improvements to technical debt – code that slows developers down and makes future development more difficult.

Coral not only helps to prevent the accumulation of hidden tech debt but also frees up engineers to focus on more creative and high-value work. It is the first example of a ‘hybrid’ engineering team at CommBank, combining the skills of its engineers with AI agents to take care of more manual and repetitive tasks.

Setting a new benchmark for engineering excellence 

CommBank created its dedicated AI Powered Engineering team in 2024 to integrate AI into engineering development practices. Through the AI Powered Engineering Program, CommBank engineers are given access to the latest AI tools and the training required to unlock engineering capability across the entire software delivery lifecycle.

“We believe AI will be so positively transformative to the craft and profession of software engineering that we have created a dedicated enablement team to test, experiment, and responsibly scale AI throughout our engineering organisation”, said Gavin Munroe, Group Chief Information Officer at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. 

“By encouraging rapid experimentation and empowering our engineers to use AI agents to take on some of the more manual and repetitive aspects of their roles, we’re aspiring to a new benchmark for engineering excellence.”

Leveraging Agentic AI to clean up tech debt 

An agentic AI solution, Project Coral is transforming how tech debt is managed across the bank. It does this by connecting to existing monitoring tools to identify problems, analyse code to suggest improvements and creates pull requests with proposed fixes. Engineers are required to review and approve all proposed changes, ensuring there is always a human in the loop. 

CommBank graduate engineers partnered with its distinguished engineers to design and build the Coral framework – which is modular and can run on any AI development tool.

CommBank CIO for Technology & Distinguished Engineer Brendan Hopper said, “Agentic AI can have a hugely transformative and positive impact on software engineering quality and velocity.

“Project Coral is taking care of repetitive, manual tech debt tasks, so our engineers can focus on what they do best: building reimagined experiences and distinct product propositions for our customers. Not only is Project Coral reducing tech debt, it can also enhance our security posture as engineers can focus more attention on complex security challenges.

“It is a great example of how an AI Powered Engineering mindset is empowering our people to solve complex problems and reduce the burden on our engineering teams.” 

 

Go to CBA Newsroom for the latest news and announcements from Commonwealth Bank.

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