Commonwealth Bank’s $90m plan for AI-ready workforce

Commonwealth Bank chief Matt Comyn says a new $90 million program to ramp up skills and accelerate careers will help both employees and the bank prepare for changing nature of work. 

The bank’s Future Workforce Program “represents a structural redesign of how skills are developed and how careers will evolve within Commonwealth Bank” the bank said in an announcement. 

“Hopefully it will accelerate many people’s careers within CBA,” Comyn said.

Businesses and workers have to prepare for a future where AI plays a bigger part and the way work got done is different, he said. 

“Australia has to get really good at adopting this technology and whatever follows it,” he said. “This is a topic we have been thinking about for some time.”

New technology to boost skills and careers 

Backed by an investment of $90 million over three years, the new Future Workforce Program includes a Grow Your Career portal that’s designed to help employees discover – based on their skills and experience – job opportunities across the bank and understand how their roles and careers could evolve. 

“It says with your skillset, with these combinations, these are all the roles that are available for you,” said Andrew Culleton, who leads the Bank’s Everyday People Services team. Many employees would be surprised at the high number of options open to them, he said.

“For us it’s about trying to create transparency and opportunity."
- Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn

The career platform is also designed to help employees identify the skills they need to move into the careers they aspire to then identify potential training opportunities to develop those skills. 

All roles in the bank, including Comyn’s, had been mapped into the system, Culleton said.

While AI is a focus of the program, the bank offers training covering a wide range of skills and topics. 

Comyn said non-technical skills like judgement, critical thinking, problem solving, and empathy would remain highly valued and critical to the bank’s recruitment and development programs. The new program was designed to help more people move into higher-value roles where those skills were in demand, he said. 

Uneven adoption of AI

Comyn said across the economy, the adoption of AI would be uneven due to the technology’s ongoing and rapid evolution and the different ways organisations and people implement it. He acknowledged this was contributing to the uncertainty the technology was bringing.

“The impact will be uneven and it’s not certain what the pace will be, but we are trying to get ahead of it,” he said.

Traditionally, organisations took decisions, made changes and then engaged with their workers after the fact, Comyn said. In contrast, CommBank was trying to give employees more control over how their careers evolved. 

The bank had worked constructively with unions to develop the program, Comyn said. 

The program is designed to prepare the CBA workforce for change over the medium term, rather than big changes in the short term. 

“For us it’s about trying to create transparency and opportunity, replacing a perception of uncertainty,” he said. 

The bank said AI-focused training had already been provided to more than 30,000 employees.

Earlier this month CommBank released a new report detailing its approach and progress in adopting AI, and in December announced a partnership with ChatGPT parent OpenAI to help upskill small business in skills like AI and cybersecurity.