The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has promised a four-fold increase in the speed artificial intelligence (AI) technology development as part of an extended partnership with hyperscale cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).

CBA’s launch of its new AI development sandbox, dubbed the ‘AI Factory’, has been touted by the bank as a “monumental step forward” in its AI transformation journey.

The newly unveiled AI Factory promises CBA engineers a safe testing and development environment for AI innovations. Upgraded AWS technology will provide the computing muscle to support the “fine-tuning and training” of AI large language models (LLMs) at increased speeds, CBA said.

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

The AI Factory will leverage “cutting-edge capabilities” from development partner AWS, including Amazon SageMaker, a machine learning managed service, and Amazon EC2 P5 Instances, backed by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, “for deep learning and high-performance computing applications”. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environments boast an up to four-times improvement in development speeds (compared to the previous generation of EC2 instances), and a 40 per cent reduction in the cost to train ML models.

CommBank notes that it is the first AWS customer in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region to make use of the service, marking, it says, “a significant milestone in the bank’s commitment to leverage AI and machine learning for enhanced customer experiences and operational efficiency”.

CommBank’s chief data and analytics officer, Dr Andrew McMullan, welcomed the extended collaboration with long-time cloud computing partner AWS as a “significant milestone in our commitment to driving digital innovation to deliver better customer outcomes and experiences, more quickly”.

“By leveraging AWS’s cloud infrastructure and latest AI capabilities, the AI Factory is set to accelerate the bank’s development time for AI-powered initiatives by around four times compared to our current rate.”

“It will empower our engineers and AI scientists to embed AI and Gen AI capabilities in their day-to-day activities enabling increased creativity and output.

McMullan added that the new compute capability will enable CBA to “deliver more personalised experiences for all our customers, reducing our time to deliver across all our channels and operations, while supporting the responsible growth of Gen AI across the bank.”