Thousands of jobs on the line in bank’s big AI play

One of Australia’s biggest banks is reportedly trialling a ChatGPT-style AI chat bot that could soon replace thousands of local call centre staff.

Commonwealth Bank is currently conducting trials of Hey CommBank – an AI chatbot currently being tested on bank employees who are also customers.

The trial is part of a wider push into artificial intelligence by the big four bank which recently became the first in Australia to use a so-called AI Factory from Amazon.

CommBank chief data officer Andrew McMullan said customers would become familiar with using ChatGPT-style services

“We are trying to understand what the engagement is like, how those agents would interact with customers, and are making sure that we’re very responsible,” he told the Australian Financial Review (AFR).

“We’re building the safety guardrails that are required to make sure that these agents can be deployed safely to customers en-masse.”

Dr McMullan said one use of Hey CommBank would be to tell customers how much they need to save to buy a house.

The chatbot would answer customer’s queries in what the bank described as a conversational manner and with data based on Commbank’s information.

Currently, CBA employs 2400 call centre staff speak who speak with up to 50,000 customers a day, though how many jobs could be impacted is not clear.

Dr McMullan said AI was already monitoring service calls which could be converted into a transcript in 1.2 seconds and were judged by AI on customer sentiment.

The shift is underpinned by its recently announced use of the “state-of-the-art AI Factory” in collaboration with the cloud computing, pay-as-you-go Amazon Web Services,

CommBank said AI factory would enable employees to “conduct safe testing and development of AI solutions” by using the computing power afforded to the AWS service.

“This will allow CommBank to provide hyper-personalised and contextualised experiences for customers and communities, more quickly and at scale,” CommBank said.