The Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s (CBA’s) group executive for technology and group chief information officer, Gavin Munroe, has revealed that the overwhelming majority of the bank’s early adopting staff would not go back to working without Microsoft’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) chatbot, Copilot.

Speaking at Microsoft’s AI Tour in Sydney today, Munroe revealed that around 85 per cent of staff would not revert to life pre-Copilot. Moreover, a further 96 per cent believed they were more productive using the technology.

In pilot trials, which began in late 2023, around 300 of the bank’s staff have had early access to Copilot for tasks including market research and text summarisation.

Similar in scope to the publicly available ChatGPT, Microsoft’s GenAI system Copilot is able to act on users’ commands to create, edit, synthesise or analyse a variety of content. This includes the outputting of text (such as the drafting of documents or spreadsheets, or the creation of computer code) and images.

The chatbot is geared towards the creation of Microsoft program-specific content, such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.

The bank’s engineering team was also among the first in Australia to test GitHub Copilot, the GenAI platform’s pair programming capability, enabling users to generate code, specific to the project’s context and style conventions, through natural language prompts.

Two-thirds of CBA 200 coders who used the pair programming technology found it “very helpful”, with the team accepting nearly 80,000 lines of code that GitHub CoPilot recommended – one-third of all the recommendations made.

Big four rivals Westpac and ANZ have also unveiled a similar GenAI-backed pair programming scheme, with the latter last year introducing the technology to 3,000 of its engineers.

Also similar in scope to ANZ’s Z-GPT, Microsoft revealed CBA’s pilot of a GenAI-backed Q&A tool designed for retail and business call centre staff to ask and answer policy and procedure questions. The technology is also being used to enable mortgage brokers to better access information to support customer enquiries.

Accelerating ‘time to yes’

Munroe revealed that the bank’s lending team has also halved its income verification processing time for loan applicants using an AI tool to “read, analyse and process customer documentation”.

Microsoft also noted the bank’s extensive use of AI for fraud, scams and financial abuse detection.

Already, between March to December 2023, CBA’s AI-backed NameCheck security tool, which has been actively shared with other banks, has been used to prevent more than 14,000 scam payments worth more than an estimated $48 million. The tool has also reduced mistaken payments by more than $199 million.