From Bunnings to banking: how AI helps organisations scale expertise across channels

From hardware aisles to bond trading floors, the shift follows a common pattern. As organisations train AI on their institutional knowledge, embedding it in customer-facing workflows or using it to support the front line, they’re then using it to help close the gap between what their people know and how many customers they can reach.

The early results show indications of tangible progress, and they’re showing up in industries that have little else in common.

Bunnings, Australia's largest home improvement retailer, recently launched an AI-powered shopping assistant called "Buddy" that guides customers through complex DIY projects.

Built on Google's Gemini platform and trained on the retailer's own library of how-to content, Buddy can interpret a photographed handwritten shopping list, walk a customer through a DIY job, present product options and estimate costs.

“At its heart, Buddy is about helping to build customer confidence,” said Bunnings managing director Mike Schneider.

“Our customers come to us with projects big and small, often looking for advice on how to get the job done. Buddy breaks down a project – like building a deck or planning a garden – into clear steps and suggests tips and products along the way,”
- Mike Schneider, Bunnings Managing Director.

“It’s harnessing AI in a very practical way to complement the advice our team provides every day and extending that into a digital experience, providing more options to interact with us. Being the first retailer in Australia to launch agentic AI on the Gemini platform with Buddy underscores our accelerated use of data and AI to improve customer experiences. That’s something we’ll soon build on by joining the first wave of local retailers offering agentic commerce direct from Google’s app and browser,” Schneider said.

Early results have been striking: Bunnings says Buddy has more than doubled conversion rates and is driving higher-value baskets as customers shop for entire projects rather than individual items.

In financial services, the same logic is being applied to more complex decisions.

Commonwealth Bank, Australia's largest bank, sees opportunities to apply AI across its 18 million customer base, particularly through personalised services delivered at scale. But it is in the bank's institutional division, where clients are large corporations, governments and financial institutions, where customer needs are complex, driving the development of advanced AI applications.

“In the Institutional Banking and Markets business that I run, one of the biggest impacts of AI has been supporting the ability to rapidly synthesise market, performance and risk data, in some cases, turning hours of work into minutes,”
- Sinead Taylor, Group Executive of Commonwealth Bank’s Institutional Banking and Markets division.

One example of this is a new bond recommendation tool the bank’s AI team developed for the corporate bond market. It helps analyse and glean insights from CBA’s Fixed Income Credit customer flows to help bankers better anticipate which securities clients may be interested in.

“What that gives my team is something simple but powerful – a clearer picture of how our clients trade, both recently and over time, helping us understand their preferences, patterns and turning points at a detail and scale we couldn't before,” Taylor said.

For client relationship managers, it means they can spend less time searching for information and more time having informed, thoughtful conversations with clients, using insights from past activity to help tailor their service.

For clients, it helps lift the consistency and quality of the service they receive, regardless of which salesperson they're working with.

But the two applications of AI are not identical. In retail, AI can help become the front door, while in institutional banking, the dynamics are different.

“In our world, AI sharpens the person leading the relationship, it doesn’t replace them. The judgement calls our clients rely on, our view on risk or a read on the shifting market, still require human accountability.”
- Sinead Taylor, Group Executive of Commonwealth Bank’s Institutional Banking and Markets division.

This insight resonates across industries. AI is most valuable when it helps carry the weight of expertise so that people, whether team members in an aisle or bankers on a trading floor, can focus on the moments where human judgement counts.

Taylor said that future gains will likely come from those moments. As AI is increasingly used to support routine work such as onboarding, documentation and approvals, the interactions that remain will likely be higher stakes and more consequential.

“AI is helping make us faster and sharper, but it hasn’t changed what support our clients are looking for,” she said.

“They’re looking for judgement that is built on trust. The technology just means we can bring more of that to more clients.”

This article was originally published in the Australian Financial Review.