For Ferd Scheepers, the move from Copenhagen to Sydney didn’t need much debate. He says he’d always said, “If I ever have chance, I want to work in Sydney or Singapore”.
When the chance came up to work with CommBank in Sydney in a role he’d always wanted, Scheepers jumped at it. He already knew the city, loved its energy, and the feeling of being somewhere big that still had a human feel. “It’s literally a dream come true to be here and working in this organisation and in this city,” he says.
That sense of enthusiasm does not seem to have faded with arrival. Scheepers talks warmly about the culture he found when he joined, describing it as friendly, welcoming and unusually open to input.
“It’s probably the friendliest tech leadership team of any organisation I have worked for,” he says.
“People are welcoming, they are happy to have you in, they listen to you, they want to help you, they want to make you succeed. That part of the culture here is absolutely amazing,” he says.
“And then you see the investment we put into AI and that we really want to be ahead of the game there and that, as an organisation, we actually care about Australia as a community. I love that part of what we're doing here. I love the passion of this organisation,” he says.
Finally tackling the scale problem
As CommBank’s most senior technology architect, Scheepers’ job is to map out the platforms that the bank uses and ensure they all work together optimally. He then has to make sure everyone else sticks to the plan. In a large organisation driven to innovate, it can be extremely challenging to keep everyone working in the same direction.
For decades, Scheepers says, architects have struggled to enforce the guardrails they’ve put in place consistently. The basic maths has always been against them. There are far more engineers than architects, which means standards can be agreed, socialised and documented, but not always checked at the scale needed.
“That's the great thing about AI. It doesn't take away your thinking, it takes away your toil. And that's what I love about it.”
It’s a huge challenge for all kinds of businesses.
But Scheepers says that, in his world, one of the most exciting things about AI is that it might be able to finally offer a solution.
“AI is a huge opportunity for me,” he says, saying it can help architects automatically enforce guardrails in designs, code and other areas. It offers a more practical way to solve the problem that has sat in large businesses for years: how to make standards stick when the number of systems, teams and decisions is simply too large to follow manually.
For example, if an organisation has agreed on a preferred database technology, whether people are actually using it is now something that can be checked much earlier and more consistently. If something falls outside the standard, the question becomes whether there’s a real reason for it, rather than whether anyone actually noticed.
Taking away the toil
While AI helps makes things possible, it’s still the human challenges of thinking and judgement that make his role what it is, Scheepers says. What AI can do is take some of the repetitive, manual work that sits around it and make it easier to scale.
But AI can be more personal too.
Scheepers says he loves standing at a whiteboard and sketching ideas. It’s a productive way to capture ideas and thinking, he says. But the part he doesn’t enjoy is spending hours later turning those sketches into polished diagrams. Here too, he sees AI closing the gap between the energising part of the work and the more mechanical toil that follows it.
“That's the great thing about AI. It doesn't take away your thinking, it takes away your toil. And that's what I love about it.”
