CommBank’s AI Success Story: Microsoft Applauds Real-World Benefits

Generative AI and its groundbreaking large language models have been around for a year, and now everyone is starting to understand how businesses can benefit from them. Australia and New Zealand are great examples of countries that were early adopters and whose governments saw the potential in that.

Here at Microsoft, they think there are four main opportunities to responsibly address long-standing organizational issues using their latest AI advancements. Enhancing employee experiences, reimagining consumer engagement, transforming corporate processes, and accelerating innovation are all part of these domains.

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Microsoft and Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Among the most prominent and forward-thinking institutions, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CommBank) is seeing success on all four fronts. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a major strategic priority for CommBank for a number of years, as Group Chief Information Officer and Group Executive for Technology Gavin Munroe explained on today’s AI Tour in Sydney.

The bank has correctly identified technology as a potent instrument for enhancing internal processes and client experiences, and it is being managed responsibly to guarantee that it produces better results for both the community and customers.

As part of its efforts to reimagine customer connection, CommBank is including AI features that better safeguard clients from fraudulent activities, such as scams and financial abuse. Its groundbreaking NameCheck security solution stopped over 14,000 fraudulent payments totaling over A$48 million between March and December 2023. Mistaken payments were cut by almost A$199 million with the use of the technology.

In order to provide its clients with highly customized experiences, such app-based personalized notifications, the bank is utilizing generative AI. It is also testing out a Q&A tool powered by generative AI to help its retail and business call center agents respond faster to inquiries about company policy and procedures and to give mortgage brokers better access to data so they can make quicker judgments when assisting clients. Another development is that CommBank is employing AI to analyze and process customer documents at a higher rate of accuracy and with less human intervention. For example, this is allowing the bank to cut the time it takes to verify a borrower’s income in half throughout the loan processing.

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Employees also benefit from these tools since they allow them to spend less time on mundane jobs and more time on meaningful interactions with clients. Additionally, CommBank is streamlining internal processes and fostering innovation with the help of the new generative AI-powered Copilot for Microsoft 365. Since the end of 2023, 300 employees of the bank have been using the technology for early access, speeding up duties like summarizing content and conducting market research.

Initial responses have been encouraging, indicating that CBA is successfully increasing Group-wide learning. The results showed that 96% of the bank’s early adopters were more productive and 84% would never return to using Microsoft 365 without Copilot. In an effort to secure the bank, get more done for clients, and speed up code delivery, the bank’s staff was one of the first in Australia to try out GitHub Copilot. After CommBank started piloting the service with 200 users, it was considered to be “very helpful” by 75% of the engineers. They went with one-third of all the suggestions offered by GitHub CoPilot, which was about 80,000 lines of code.

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To conclude, it is worth mentioning that CommBank has established strong frameworks and policies to ensure the protection of its data and to direct its AI operations. The bank has also played a pivotal role in determining Australia’s policy on the ethical and responsible application of artificial intelligence.