Macquarie Bank is the first major Australian bank to publicly reveal its plans to adopt Google’s newly-launched business AI offering, Gemini Enterprise.
Launched overnight in the US, Gemini Enterprise is the cloud computing and search giant’s latest bid to sell artificial intelligence agents to businesses.
The bank, which has steadily been deepening its reliance on Google’s cloud services since 2019 – when it began building its internal services on Google Cloud – said it is aiming to have all employees integrating AI into their daily work within six months.
The bank said that, to date, 99 percent of its current employees had completed an online generative AI training course and that a further 3000 had attended Gemini Enterprise demos.
Head of technology Richard Heeley said that the move would help the bank tackle increasing competitive pressure in the retail banking sector by increasing its agility to scale quickly and intelligently.
“How do we do this in a thoughtful and strategic way? We think the answer is to provide our employees with the most advanced AI tools to increase our pace of delivery and allow our teams to have more time to focus on high-value tasks, which will ultimately lead to better customer outcomes,” Heeley said.
Based on Google’s advanced Gemini AI models, Gemini Enterprise is intended to provide a no-code, application agnostic means for large organisations to develop AI agents that can be used by employees through familiar and user-friendly chat interfaces.
Macquarie said that it would be developing agents for both individual productivity and tacking more sophisticated enterprise functions such as code generation, system design documentation, document analysis and document discovery.
The bank did not disclose how much it would cost to deploy the new agentic platform across the organisation, however reports from the US indicate that per seat licensing for Gemini Enterprise starts at around $US30 per month.
Google has also launched a version of the platform aimed at smaller businesses, Gemini Business, which costs $US21 per month per head.
The bank foreshadowed its move to adopt Gemini Enterprise earlier this year.
In April, the bank’s chief digital officer Luis Uguina told the Google Cloud Next 25 conference that the bank had “more than 30” AI-augmented products and services slated for development in 2025.
Macquarie Bank’s AI and data chief Ashwin Sinha said: “If an AI initiative doesn’t result in better features, a more seamless customer experience, or more reliable service for our customers, we question its value.
“Everything comes back to creating happier customers who want to engage with us more”.
