Commonwealth Bank (CBA) will be the first big bank in Australia to launch a generative AI chatbot that can be used by millions of Australians for a range of services. Executives from the nation’s largest bank praised the technology’s possibilities during a presentation Thursday.
AI has already helped solve problems related to call center wait times, fraud detection and scam losses. The bank said the move to generative artificial intelligence would provide even better results.
Angus Sullivan, ABC The group head of retail banking explained that generative AI would be a game-changer for its 10 million customers.
“I am very excited to announce that we are launching the first and one of the first banks in the world to launch a Gen AI-powered messaging service directly to our customers,” he said.
“We have many predetermined or already designed flows to solve our customers’ service problems, but sometimes we fail to do so, and the true power of AI can then come to the fore.
“Or if a customer has really complex questions, we have a very high-quality, curated information environment from which we can derive AI-generation answers.”
If a CBA customer does not want to work with the AI chatbot, they can always choose to speak to a person during office hours.
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The bank already processes 50,000 online requests per day and generative AI will help resolve 10% of requests that the messaging service currently cannot respond to.
As for the remaining 90 percent, technology is expected to increase the speed, quality and accuracy of responses.
Generative AI is similar to ChatGPT and can scour systems for information and provide results in seconds. The current messaging service used by CBA relies on predetermined responses and may not be able to determine exactly what the customer has searched for.
“It’s really important to keep this information repository up to date to ensure our customers can get accurate, up-to-date information,” Sullivan said.
“Gen AI builds on our existing catalog, website and policy documents that we have available.”
The Commonwealth Bank said the artificial technology messaging service had already reduced call center waiting times from 40 percent and this is expected to improve over time.