State of Data & AI: Model or Service Selection

Banking on AI returns

One group that has thrown itself enthusiastically into exploring the power of LLMs has been Australia’s banks, who represent prime candidates for AI usage due to the massive amounts of data they hold and their ongoing desire to provide improved services with greater efficiency.

At NAB, chief data and analytics officer Christian Nelissen said the bank’s intention was to make data ‘like electricity’ in its ability to power simple, safe, and more personalised banking experiences for customers.

He said for the past three years NAB had been building a powerful and modern data platform that used data to deliver more relevant, personalised interactions, and harnessing generative AI was another way the bank could simplify process so bankers could spend more time with customers.

Before it could achieve that goal however, it had some cleaning up to do.

“When I joined NAB, our environment was very complex,” Nelissen said.

“We had two legacy data warehouses and an existing data lake. One of our biggest shifts was moving away from these legacy platforms such as Teradata, which was a 26-year-old platform.”

A key foundation of NAB’s data and AI strategy was an earlier decisions to take a cloud-first approach to new systems adoption. Today more than 85 percent of NAB’s applications are on cloud.

“By consolidating and modernising our data infrastructure into a cloud-native architecture, we’ve unlocked greater agility, scalability, and real-time decision making,” Nelissen said.

“This has improved resilience, streamlined data access, reduced latency, and enabled us to respond to customer needs with speed and precision.”

Another key decision had been the adoption of Databricks as NAB’s strategic data platform, which was dubbed ‘Ada’ in honour of pioneering female computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. Nelissen said this AWS-based cloud-native data lakehouse had become NAB’s single platform for all data, tooling, and consumption needs.

“In three years, we’ve quickly gone from establishing foundations and building pipelines to a data platform that now manages all AI and BI data workloads, powers business critical use cases and is delivering at massive scale and in near real-time,” Nelissen said.

Today Ada contains 1.1 petabytes of live data, processes 1,000,000 queries a month, and is the foundation for NAB’s so-called ‘Customer Brain’ and GenAI platform.

“Our Customer Brain utilises AI and machine learning across 1200 adaptive models, leading to more than 50 million customer interactions every month,” Nelissen said.

“In three years, the Brain now has 220 different ‘actions’ it can prompt a customer about, depending on their situation and needs. These actions can be service related, engagement related or sales and product related. Around 60 per cent of actions are service and engagement focused because being helpful builds trust and trust builds loyalty.  

“This is delivering tailored, timely and relevant experiences at significant scale for our 10 million customers.”

Nelissen said the cloud-first strategy had also been important for enabling NAB to quickly adopt new AI platforms as they emerged.

“It’s a huge thing for us as it is for everybody,” Nelissen said.

“Every time you think you’ve got a handle on this, something new emerges with it and it kicks-up another gear. Given the significant maturity and scale of our Data Platform, we have been able to quickly and safely build and scale our GenAI platform on that foundation. It has strict data and AI guardrails, supported by our Data Ethics Framework, to help ideas go from test-and-learn to scale and delivering value.”