Commonwealth Bank of Australia has teamed up with Amazon Web Services to launch an inhouse 'AI Factory' with the aim of accelerating the adoption of Generative AI.
The AI Factory will enable employees to conduct safe testing and development of AI solutions by providing the compute power required to fine-tune and train large language models (LLMs) at increased speeds.
The AI Factory will use capabilities from AWS including Amazon SageMaker, a machine learning (ML) managed service, and Amazon EC2 P5 Instances for deep learning and high performance computing applications.
CommBank’s chief data and analytics officer, Dr Andrew McMullan, says: “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. With this new compute capability, we are unlocking CommBank 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.”
The bank has been utilising AI for a number of years to better protect customers from fraud and scams, and in detecting technology-facilitated abuse.
In October it revealed that it was studying the use of generative AI to create 'synthetic customers' capable of emulating human behaviour, to test the response to new products and services.
it has also rolled out an an AI microlearning series to all employees, covering topics such as generative AI, deep learning and responsible AI.
Say McMullen: “AI has been a strategic focus for CommBank for a number of years, with recent advances in Gen AI promising significant uplifts to improving customer experience and simplifying core banking operational processes. The technology is advancing quickly, and we need the right infrastructure in place to support our strategic goal of building tomorrow’s bank today for the benefit of our customers. The AI Factory will ensure that we are properly set-up to leverage this emerging technology effectively.