ANZ is set to launch an ‘Australia and New Zealand first’ AI Immersion Centre, designed to increase artificial intelligence (AI) literacy and accelerate generative AI (GenAI) adoption “at scale” within the bank.

The Centre, built in cooperation with bigtech Microsoft, promises “hands-on learning experiences” for ANZ employees, with an initial focus on upskilling the bank’s senior leaders to “spearhead AI adoption throughout the organisation”.

Carina Parisella, ANZ’s head of group technology workforce (tribe lead), and overseer of the Immersion Centre’s launch and programming function, said the facility would serve to “[inspire] and [educate] our leaders on AI”.

“We want them to understand what’s possible so they can rethink their business models and embrace AI safely and securely,” she said in a recent ANZ blog post.

ANZ plans to send 3,000 of its leaders through the Melbourne CBD-based Immersion Centre over the next 12 months, with the hope of accelerating AI adoption at scale.

These AI-literate leaders will then, the bank said, be able to support their teams in adopting tools as they become available.

Outlining the bank’s extensive AI deployments to date, ANZ group executive of technology Gerard Florian said the bank is “actively embracing generative AI across all lines of our business to improve how we serve and protect our customers, process work and meet regulatory standards”.

Complementing the launch of the Centre, ANZ announced it would expand on its early, limited-scale trial of Copilot (as part of Microsoft’s Early Access Program for industry participants), Microsoft’s embedded generative AI system, with the purchase of an additional 3,000 licences.

“Our strategic investment in Copilot for Microsoft 365 is evidence of our commitment to harnessing the power of generative AI to enhance our services, streamline operations and empower our employees,” Florian said.

The bank noted its successful deployment late last year of pair programming tool GitHub Copilot to 3,000 of its software developers and engineers.

Florian boasts that the tool has delivered an up to 55 per cent productivity saving for certain programming tasks, with millions of lines of additional code generated, as well as an overall improvement in code quality.

ANZ has also welcomed Copilot for Microsoft 365 as a key enabling tool for its employees to explore other generative AI use cases across the organisation.

“As ANZ embraces generative AI at speed and scale, we remain steadfast in our commitment to security alongside innovation and technological advancement,” Florian said.

Among the most compelling and practicable use cases for GenAI technology has been in supporting and fast-tracking the Suncorp Bank integration process – one that involves the absorption of more than 3,000 employees and 1.2 million customers of the Queensland-headquartered bank.

ANZ said it has been using GenAI to expedite the otherwise tedious and manual process of “normalising” documentation (including policies, standards and risk documentation) between the institutions.

“Traditionally, businesses would have completed this process manually, making it costly and open to human error. But by using generative AI tools like Copilot, the banking group is making this process faster, while driving greater consistency and accuracy,” Microsoft wrote.

According to ANZ CIO of group services, technology Jo Hayes, the bank has increased the efficiency of this process by 80 per cent using generative AI, “saving us a huge amount of person-hours and increasing our consistency significantly”.

Florian concluded: “The result [of leveraging GenAI] is going to be a very different banking experience, where we can help our customers to improve their financial wellbeing in a sustainable way, for our employees equally though, it’s going to be around being able to enjoy and thrive and develop in areas that people want to focus with their work.”