ANZ explores agentic AI opportunities

ANZ Banking Group is seeking out AI agent opportunities to improve its banker productivity.

(L-R) Eran Agrios, Salesforce GM and SVP, Financial Services and Gerard Florian, ANZ group executive for technology

Group executive for technology Gerard Florian told an Agentforce Financial Services Summit last week that agentic AI could reinforce gains made through digital-first arm ANZ Plus.

ANZ Plus' “platform mindset … [has] put us in a position where we've seen a five times increase in the speed of delivery of features to customers", as well as a "reduction in the cost-to-acquire and cost-to-serve, north of 30 percent," Florian said.

However, there are still inefficiencies in the way people work, which Florian indicated could be an improvement target.

“Is there an opportunity with something like AgentForce to look at from a banker productivity perspective, how do we help people prepare for meetings? How do we help people with follow-ups and so on?

“There's a lot of lost time, whether it's an engineer or a relationship manager. We all have these inefficiencies in what we do today.”

He indicated that proof-of-concept work is targeting some particular areas of inefficiency, as opposed to entire end-to-end processes.

ANZ first began authorised generative AI exploration in early 2023 to augment its code testing capabilities as well as to explore deeper potential use cases.

ANZ’s AI approach

More broadly, Florian said “potential risks” around AI experimentation are that it leads to “lots of little experiments happening here [and there] that don't get to scale”.

“Part of the model that we're trying to apply within ANZ is let's make sure that we start with the process and understand the end-to-end process, whatever that might be," he said.

“It could be loan approval, it could be customer onboarding, it could be recruitment, whatever the process is, be very clear on that”.

By understanding the full business processes and each task at ANZ bank, "you start to have a conversation around where does AI fit in", he said. 

“Is it a simple case of using some machine learning or traditional AI? Is it a generative AI opportunity? Is it an agentic AI opportunity?"

This clarity is particularly important as the bank begins to navigate agentic AI opportunities.

Embracing emerging technology 

Florian said when the likes of ChatGPT became viral in late 2022, “we had to make a quick call to say, we're going to embrace this, not resist it.”

This led to the formation of an ‘AI immersion centre’ which saw ANZ put leaders through training to accelerate AI adoption, in partnership with Microsoft.

“We're now over 12 months into that journey. We've got a centre in Melbourne, a centre in New Zealand, and a centre in India," Florian said.

“We've put about 2000 people through it and they're now bringing their teams through, so what we're getting is this flywheel effect.”

He added, “What's happening is people are seeing their bosses talking about the opportunity, saying it’s okay, but also saying, let's be mindful of the risks.

“We're getting that balanced conversation and that's just helping us build momentum for what I believe is probably the single biggest change program we will all go through over the next few years.”