Proximity and pace: CommBank embeds teams at the frontier of AI as it opens San Francisco Technology Hub

CommBank technologists and product teams are gathering in downtown San Francisco, but this is not another day at the office.

The teams are part of the first two squads in residence at CommBank’s new San Francisco Technology Hub where they have stepped into one of the world’s most concentrated AI ecosystems.

The new hub which opened this month, enables the team to work side by side with frontier AI leaders to help accelerate the way new technologies are learned and applied back home in Australia.

It builds on the success of CommBank’s Seattle Tech Hub which opened in March 2025 and has supported learning for more than 100 CommBank technologists over the past year. Across the two locations, CommBank is working closely with OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic and Microsoft.

CommBank Chief Executive Officer Matt Comyn said the new technology hub would give the bank’s engineers and technologists access to world-class tools, expertise and partners.

“This is part of our commitment to working at the frontier of technology, alongside leading global partners,” Comyn said.

“We’re investing significantly in our people and capability, because attracting and supporting the best talent means giving them access to the best tools, expertise and opportunities globally.”

CommBank co-Chief Information Officer, Central Technology, Rodrigo Castillo said the new San Francisco Tech Hub will help CommBank continue to scale AI solutions. “What we are looking for is connectivity between our teams and the places where AI models are being created here in the heart of San Francisco.”

Immersive AI learning and collaboration

CommBank team members have spent two weeks at the SanFrancisco hub, participating in collaborative learning opportunities with leading AI labs.

CommBank Lead for AI Powered Engineering & International Tech Hubs Martha McKeen, said the experience was designed to help solve challenges and unlock opportunities at home. “Our tech hubs are all about creating incredible surfaces for learning. We bring our best technologists from Australia to embed really deeply with our strategic partners,” she said.

“The goal for us is to have them take away all the learning that they can from our strategic partners, and bring that back to Australia, to become force multipliers, and scale and compound that capability across our 10,000-plus technologists.”

CommBank Crew Lead, Core Foundations George Beniac said collaborating with one of the key strategic partners in the venture, OpenAI, during the San Francisco experience has really changed the way his learning squad is thinking about how it can use AI from planning to product design, to code development, and deployment.

“It’s been fantastic to partner closely with OpenAI and really deeply understanding how they areleveraging AI assistants to accelerate the way they work and rapidly prototype new features,” Beniac said.

“What surprised me most about the experience in San Francisco is probably how our partners are able to rapidly iterate and work together across all parts of their business towards a singular outcome.”

Henry Chan, Product Owner AI Powered Engineering, led a learning squad including product owners, engineers and data scientists.

“Very quickly, from the moment you land in San Francisco you notice all the billboards are AI-related. You realise this environment is, by default, AI-powered,” he said. “Your brain automatically switches.”

“One of the things that we specifically came to San Francisco to learn was how other leading companies are able to move so quickly, how they’ve changed or altered or augmented their product delivery life cycles over the last couple of years,” Chan said.

The one insight that has stuck with him is how important it is to give team members the freedom to experiment. “Prototyping is a way that AI has allowed people to translate their thoughts into real life use cases. Only by giving team members time to explore a prototype will we be able to get the next best idea.”

Collaboration breeding acceleration

Dom Grillo, Global Head of Technical Success at OpenAI, said being in close proximity with CommBank teams was accelerating how both organisations learn and build together.

“Proximity sets the pace. The fact that we’re next door to each other now, and that we have the ability to deeply share what’s happening with our roadmap and current initiatives, creates a real flywheel of feedback,” he said.

“As we work more closely together to bring AI into CommBank, we’re learning along the way how to improve models, products and how we work together. Having that proximity on top of an already deep collaboration is a massive accelerant.”

Changing the speed of technology

CommBank’s McKeen said squads at the hub have also been looking deeply at how AI is reshaping the way software is designed, built and maintained.

“While in San Francisco we've been really focussed on AI-powered engineering,” she said.

“That is, giving our engineers the emerging best of breed, AI-powered engineering tools. These tools help them in their everyday workflows, and relieve the toil and burden of manual tasks and allows them to focus onw hat matters most”.

Doing that allows engineers to focus on high-value work to applying judgement to system design and “really making the decisions that matter when it comes to engineering the best products for our customers,” McKeen added.

CommBank co-Chief Information Officer Central Technology Rodrigo Castillo said AI powered engineering had developed significant momentum at the bank. “More than 70% of our engineering teams use AI tools  today and they are changing how we carry out different types of engineering tasks in the organisation,” he said.

AI is only just getting started

Open AI’s Grillo said while AI itself is not new, today’s challenge is keeping up with what is now an exponential rate of development and improvement.

“And I think 2026 is going to actually be in some ways not just the year of agents, but the year of democratisation of those agents,” he said.

He says the power of agentic technology means the days of needing a substantial amount of engineering effort, strong technical teams and operational support just to get things off the ground are coming to an end.