Ranil Boteju is back at CommBank for his third stint, this time as Chief AI Officer. It’s a role that brought him back to Australia after more than a decade overseas, where he held senior data, analytics and AI roles across major global financial institutions and telecommunications companies.
For Boteju, the move was both a return to a familiar organisation and an opportunity to help shape how AI is used safely and effectively across one of Australia’s largest companies.
“I’ve always found the culture here was a really good fit for me,” Boteju says. “It’s an organisation where, if you do well at CBA, you can actually impact Australia.”
The opportunity to shape AI at scale
Boteju says CommBank’s ambition, capability and focus on responsible AI were key factors in deciding to return. He says the bank has already built strong foundations for its AI efforts, from technical talent and business leadership to partnerships with leading AI companies.
CommBank is ranked fourth in the world in the Evident AI Index and first in the Asia Pacific region. The Index measures maturity on AI within the banking sector globally and recognises CommBank for its leadership in Talent Development and Responsible AI Leadership in particular.
“We’ve amassed an incredible array of talent,” he says. “I’m amazed at how there is so much talent not just in my own team, but federated across the business. That includes technical people, engineers, data scientists and developers, as well as business leaders who understand AI and want to reimagine what we do.”
In addition, “the ambition is sky high. We’ve got some amazing partnerships with some of the best AI companies in the world”.
“This is the place to work if you want to work with the best AI talent, use the best tools and the best platforms,” Boteju says, describing his own role as helping bring together the work already happening across the bank and supporting teams to use AI in a consistent, safe and scalable way.
“To deliver AI at an organisation, you need a village,” Boteju says. “My role is to coordinate a whole group of people across the bank to reimagine CommBank in the context of AI.”
AI as part of everyone’s job
Boteju says one of the most important lessons from his global experience is that AI can’t be confined to one specialist team. “We need to think about AI as something that’s going to impact every single aspect of the bank, and therefore we need to work with everyone,” he says.
“AI is part of everyone’s job. It can’t be just concentrated in one team.”
He compares the shift to the digital and mobile transformation that reshaped banking more than a decade ago. In the early days, digital work often sat in specialised teams, but over time, it became part of how every team worked.
“AI will be exactly the same,” he says, saying that achieving that means giving all teams across the bank the skills, tools, platforms and guardrails they need to use AI safely and effectively.
Using AI where it makes a difference
Boteju says the big AI opportunity isn’t just to make existing work happen faster. It’s to apply AI areas where it can help customers and colleagues in ways that were previously too complex, too time-consuming or impossible to scale with human effort alone.
“I think it’s really important that we’re clear about where we want to deploy AI,” he says.
Boteju says his goal is to help CommBank use AI in a way that improves customer experiences, supports colleagues and helps set a standard for responsible adoption more broadly. And he says his own view very much aligns with the direction being set at CommBank. “It’s amazing for me to land somewhere where how I’ve thought about things is exactly how the organisation thinks about things,” he says.
“I genuinely feel that across the bank, there’s a critical mass of leaders that really understand AI,” Boteju says. “They also want to deliver it in a way that’s beneficial to society.”
Moving safely and with confidence
Boteju says safety, privacy and accuracy must remain central to how AI is designed and used. “We want to do this safely,” he says. “We want to do this in a way that respects customers’ privacy. We want to do it in a way where we know the outcomes of our tools are correct.”
At the same time, he says organisations need to be prepared to test, learn and move with confidence.
Being overly cautious is also a risk, he says. “Having a risk appetite that enables us to test things is going to be critical.”
A future where AI becomes embedded
Asked to describe the future of AI in one word, Boteju says AI should become “invisible”. “I think in about 10 years’ time, AI will be embedded into everything we do in the same way that electricity was,” he says. “AI will be invisible. We won’t even know it’s there. It’ll be making our lives more productive and helping us. That’s how I want it to land.”
