NAB says AI will cut the drudgery for its bankers

“No doubt, AI will change the way we work,” NAB chief data and analytics officer Christian Nelissen said.

“Our key focus is giving our people more time to spend with customers to develop higher quality relationships and to do less of the boring stuff. By taking out 80 per cent of the work that is drudgery, it leaves you with the 20 per cent that involves time with colleagues and customers.”

Some corporate bankers might deal with 20 or 30 emails from customers a day, which could take hours to respond to. By automatically drafting responses, bankers could use generative AI to pen a standard reply and tweak the text before sending, freeing up time to spend on other tasks, he said.

NAB is also developing ways for its marketing teams to tailor messages to particular customer groups, such as around fraud and scams, which will allow it to bring some campaigns in-house and reduce use of external agencies.

“We see some real value in doing that,” Mr Nelissen said. “A lot of that work goes out, and we can do it internally, faster and cheaper and get a better response.”

NAB says the Microsoft pilots over the past month have involved 300 staff, and the bank is considering how widely to make the technology available.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will cost an additional $US30 ($47.60) per user each month, on top of $US36 per month for the suite of 365 apps. This would leave NAB on the hook for an additional $1.6 million a month if the bank decided to provide the features to all of its 35,000 staff, or almost $20 million a year.

“The question is, where do we deploy this?” Mr Nelissen said. “The licensing cost is not trivial. So, we want to be thoughtful where we roll it out and make sure we get value from it.

“We are seeing some interesting pieces of qualitative feedback and output, and we do need to decide on how widely we roll it out. We are minded to move on these things as quickly as possible.”

NAB’s deepening relationship with Microsoft comes after the bank’s chief executive Ross McEwan visited the company in Seattle earlier this year, and then took his top 16 executives back to the United States in June to further explore Microsoft’s AI offering.

Alongside Databricks, NAB human resources teams are also using AI to develop internal training courses in days rather than weeks, while call centre staff in the retail bank are testing it to answer customer questions.

This use case is also being explored by Commonwealth Bank, ANZ Bank and Macquarie.

Databricks is helping NAB test multiple “large language models”, and Mr Nelissen said this optionality was critical given how fast AI was developing.

“We don’t want to be constrained, so if we find another model has come along that is better and more efficient, we can use that,” he said.

Westpac is also using AI to help its banks to improve communications with customers alongside Amazon Web Services. AWS is helping Westpac software engineers develop code. Macquarie said earlier this year it would apply an “AI-first approach” across its retail bank and sees AI as “a big productivity uplifter.”