Bendigo Bank is continuing on its AI journey, having announced that it has over 3,000 ideas for agentic AI and how it can improve the organisation.
As originally reported by journalist Ry Crozier of itnews, who attended the Google Cloud Summit as a guest of Google Cloud, Bendigo Bank chief technology officer Kieran O’Meara said that the company’s 3,000 AI ideas were currently being run through a number of gates to determine what should be prioritised.
If the ideas pass through those gates, the bank will consider funding them.
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“The single most common thing that happens is we have hammers looking for nails,” O’Meara said during his speech at the Google Cloud Summit Sydney.
“Every idea is an agentic idea. Actually, the reality is about 80 per cent of what gets pitched is not really an agentic problem. It’s not really an agentic opportunity. It’s a deterministic opportunity. We can solve it in other ways.
“But the things that we choose to go forward with are most commonly both: they require both intelligent reasoning or judgement and deterministic work to achieve the outcome.”
The bank is also evaluating whether or not going down the agentic AI route for a task is financially and operationally beneficial, as well as auditable. It’s also evaluating what dangers lie in using agentic AI to run certain activities.
“I have seen real examples where the agentic workflow is more expensive than doing it the way we do it today,” O’Meara said.
“In one particular call centre example, the cost of the interaction agentically was going to be about $9 versus the human-supported interaction of about $3.50.”
Another key check is whether or not the bank is in the position to actually implement and work an idea.
“We’ve fallen into this trap a few times. Do we have the data? Can we build the integrations? Do we understand the semantics? And do we have that multidisciplinary team to achieve the outcome?” he said.
“[This is] essentially how we test what comes in and how we decide what to move forward with to put the real money into achieving the outcome.”
The ideas were formed by the bank’s “over 5,000” staff over a nine-month period after Bendigo Bank gave AI tools to its staff, such as Google Cloud’s Gemini, and invested in training and upskilling them on the use of AI tools.
“What we didn’t do was we didn’t put [AI] in a lab. We didn’t run experiments in the traditional sense,” O’Meara said.
“We very deliberately went wide and we started at the top with education, including the board and the executives, because these leaders needed to know how to lead this work.”
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Daniel Croft
Born in the heart of Western Sydney, Daniel Croft is a passionate journalist with an understanding for and experience writing in the technology space. Having studied at Macquarie University, he joined Momentum Media in 2022, writing across a number of publications including Australian Aviation, Cyber Security Connect and Defence Connect. Outside of writing, Daniel has a keen interest in music, and spends his time playing in bands around Sydney.