Commonwealth Bank is expecting to complete its data migration to AWS by May this year, cutting an 18-month project by half.
CBA chief data and analytics officer Andrew McMullan revealed the bank is increasingly using AI agents to assist with the “data delivery lifecycle”, which is helping accelerate its move to AWS and “the way we do data at Commonwealth Bank”.
“So whatever part of that life cycle you’re thinking about, whether it’s ingestion of data onto the platform, whether it’s test automation or metadata capture or understanding requirements, or maybe it’s legacy logic that you’ve written, we’ve been building AI agents for all of that process,” McMullan said.
As such, the bank has doubled its ability “to deploy [software] changes into production, with increased quality” within the last 12 months.
Speaking at AWS’ Data and AI Roadshow in Sydney, McMullan said CBA’s recent adoption of AWS’ EC2 P5 compute instances had “empowered all of [its] engineers and AI scientists to embed AI and generative AI capabilities in their day-to-day activities”.
“By providing the whole enterprise with access to this compute required has unlocked the ability to conduct much more experimentation, safe testing, and the development and deployment of AI everywhere across the enterprise,” he said.
McMullan highlighted the bank’s recent adoption of AI to prevent customer losses from frauds and scams.
“Many traditional platforms would use rules to try and predict fraud and scams, and they’ve been very successful at doing that, but we realised that maybe the combination of AI and some really high-performing rules would be a better way to do that,” he said.
“So we’ve been investing in that capability; moving some rules to AI [and] we can actually respond to alerts on our AI platform within 10 milliseconds.”
These alerts enable CBA to “identify and predict if something looks like a fraud or a scam”, McMullan explained, and therefore warn customers of potential fraudulent activity.
This, in tandem with other fraud initiatives, have led to a 30 percent reduction in fraud losses and 50 percent reduction in scam losses incurred by CBA customers in the last 12 months, he added.
McMullan’s announcement comes just a month after CBA renewed its agreement with AWS as its preferred cloud provider for another five years.
