We have a clear direction for the future of Technology at ANZ, centred on building a more resilient organisation, simplifying legacy platforms and enabling the business to deliver market-leading customer experiences.
Artificial Intelligence is helping us achieve that vision. AI is not a separate strategy for ANZ. It is a critical enabler of ANZ 2030, supporting growth, improving productivity and helping us manage risk more effectively.
We see AI creating value in three key ways: delivering more relevant and personalised experiences for customers and better tools for our bankers; simplifying work and increasing productivity and capacity; and strengthening how we manage risk.
Importantly, our approach is deliberately targeted. Rather than pursuing AI everywhere, we are prioritising opportunities where the technology can be embedded into the way work gets done, where it delivers clear business value, and where it can scale across the bank.
That focus is already delivering results.
Helping bankers spend more time with customers
One example is the rollout of AI-powered capabilities within ANZ’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform for business and private bankers.
ANZ has deployed AI-powered CRM capabilities at scale, giving bankers customer summaries that bring together information from previous interactions and banking history.
The capability provides a consolidated view of customer information and equips our frontline bankers with insights that support more informed and personalised customer conversations.
Small Business Lending Specialist Sean Brodrick sees the impact of these tools in the discussions he has with customers every day. By bringing together information from previous interactions, AI helps to provide important context.
"I can now make the conversation more personalised from the start," Sean says.
"Because I already understand their history, the conversation feels like a continuation rather than starting from the beginning," he explains.
The result is less time spent gathering information and more time focused on understanding customer needs and discussing potential solutions.
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Sean Broderick, Small Business Lending Specialist at ANZ.
An AI teammate for engineers
AI is also playing an important role in helping our engineers deliver technology solutions more efficiently.
Across the bank, engineers are increasingly using AI-assisted tools to support coding, testing, documentation and software development.
The objective is not to replace engineers, but to help them work more effectively by reducing repetitive tasks and accelerating delivery.
Rob Amos, a Principal Software Engineer working on ANZ's Single Customer Front End program, describes AI as a valuable teammate.
"AI helps us move faster through routine tasks, automating boilerplate code generation and decreasing cycle time while maintaining our existing quality controls," he explains.
"More than just moving quicker, AI allows us to scale our time across more tasks in parallel, stopping only when it needs us to apply engineering judgement or make decisions on customer outcomes. AI expands our engineering reach across the application stack, allowing us to collaborate faster between front end and back end teams."
This capability is already delivering measurable benefits.
AI software engineering has now doubled our capacity to deliver code for the Single Customer Front End.
Importantly, these gains are being achieved while maintaining appropriate oversight, governance and engineering standards.
Supporting better customer service in our contact centres
The same principle is being applied in ANZ's Enterprise Contact Centre, where AI is helping colleagues respond to customer enquiries more efficiently and effectively.
AI capabilities including voice transcription, conversation summaries, note-taking, conversational insights and intelligent routing are already being used to help reduce administrative effort and improve how customer enquiries are managed.
Head of Digital Customer Engagement, Yannie Onsen, says customer interactions are becoming simpler.
"This new technology takes friction out of the experience, so customers can get the right help with simple queries faster and our bankers can spend more of their time in conversations where human judgement and empathy really matter."
The technology is also helping improve efficiency at scale, by freeing up capacity for contact centre colleagues and allowing teams to focus on customers with more complex needs.
While human judgement remains central to every customer interaction, AI is helping streamline processes behind the scenes, supporting faster and more consistent service.
This reflects ANZ's broader approach to embedding AI into end-to-end workflows rather than deploying standalone tools.
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Yannie Onsen (left), Head of Digital Customer Engagement at ANZ.
Building for scale, safely
While the opportunities created by AI are significant, trust remains central to ANZ's approach.
As a bank, we understand new technologies must be adopted responsibly and supported by robust governance and controls.
As such, we’re implementing an Enterprise AI Control Plane providing continuous visibility, governance and technical control across users, models, agents, tools and platforms.
As we increasingly use AI agents, humans must remain in control. This new Control Plane sets defined limits on what agents can do and stops activity where it operates outside those limits.
We also know that technology alone won't determine our success with AI. Equally important is investing in our people.
That's why we're establishing an AI Academy to lift AI literacy across ANZ and build role-specific capabilities through practical learning, experimentation and accreditation. Our goal is to create a sustainable pipeline of skills that empowers colleagues to use AI safely, effectively and responsibly.
I am confident this approach will support the delivery of ANZ 2030. Nevertheless, we remain focused on ensuring the right balance between human judgement and technology, and on understanding the broader impact AI will have on our customers, colleagues and the communities we serve.
Donald Patra is Group Chief Information Officer at ANZ.