Commonwealth Bank (ASX: CBA) has announced a five-year deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to continue as the bank's cloud service provider.
Director of Financial Services for AWS Australia and New Zealand, Jamie Simon said both companies are excited to expand on the decade-long partnership.
“Together we will simplify and standardise their [Commbank’s] technology foundations on the most secure and resilient cloud platform, enabling faster experimentation and adoption of AI and other key technologies,” said Simon.
Commbank said in their announcement that AWS works to simplify the bank’s technology environment, accelerate AI adoption and improve the delivery of new customer experiences faster and more securely.
The existing deal with AWS was central to the bank releasing their AI communication tool CommBiz Gen AI, to thousands of customers in just six weeks from idea to production.
The AI tool allows Business Banking customers to make payments and transactions much faster by utilising information from over 80 different CommBiz user guides and FAQs to provide relevant information quickly.
In November 2024, the bank outlined how artificial intelligence would be used to help transform the customer experience.
They reported that messaging channels have increased in popularity over the past five years with their retail customers using it to make more than 50,000 enquiries a day.
The introduction of AI infrastructure is therefore expected to increase the speed, quality, and precision of responses customers get and help resolve the 10% of enquiries the messaging platform cannot currently answer.
The bank’s chief technology officer Rodrigo Castillo said that as digital banking continues to expand, Commonwealth Bank is using AI and cloud technology to bring customers fast, safe and personal banking.
“AI is enabling new experiences for customers delivered faster than before, providing a frictionless experience to build and release new AI-powered products and features for our customers in a safe, responsible way,” said Castillo.
This follows the successful launch of CommBank’s AI Factory in September 2024.
Powered by Amazon EC2 P5 Instances, it works to accelerate AI adoption across the bank and enable engineers to safely test and develop AI solutions while leveraging increased computing power to fine-tune large AI language models at higher speeds.