The Commonwealth Bank has entered into a strategic partnership with artificial intelligence company H2O.ai to uplift its own AI personalisation capabilities throughout the bank.
Hailing from Silicon Valley, H2O.ai is a cloud-based machine learning platform that helps customers build and scale AI-based services.
CBA took a minority stake in the company after leading a US$100 million (A$134 million) Series E funding round and becoming H2O.ai’s exclusive financial services partner in Australia and New Zealand.
Under the exclusive partnership, CBA now has access to H2O.ai’s team of machine learning engineers and data scientists to assist the bank in creating AI-powered solutions.
CBA chief executive Matt Comyn said working with H2O.ai will allow the bank to provide smarter and better tailored products to its customers.
“The partnership will further differentiate and extend our artificial intelligence capability to better anticipate customer needs, and reimagine products and digital experiences to meet those needs," Comyn said in a statement.
“It will accelerate our ability to deliver a broader customer proposition through more personalised experiences, which delivers greater value for our customers.”
Comyn said CBA envisions AI and machine learning technology being implemented right across the bank's operations, building on "foundational data and analytics capabilities that the bank has developed over the past decade."
CBA’s chief data and analytics officer Dr Andrew McMullan will sit on the H2O.ai board.
“Through this partnership, we will be able to better help customers find personalised and relevant offers to save money while they shop across [CBA] platforms... while at the same time driving sales for merchants," McMullan said.
H2O.ai founder and CEO Sri Ambati said the partnership will “unleash the juggernaut” of AI co-innovation and make CBA an “AI superpower.”
