ANZ ready to deepen AI responsibility

ANZ Banking Group’s chief technology officer, Tim Hogarth has said its approach to AI will be deeply steeped in our need for responsibility” with 2024 it drives “value from AI to advance ANZ’s purpose”. 

Hogarth said in a Bluesnotes post the bank’s “approach to AI will be deeply steeped in our need for responsibility. 

“Ensuring data security and privacy remains our top priority. AI does not alter in any way our commitment to our values; it reinforces them.  

“AI has the potential to identify bias more effectively than traditional systems, it allows us to make banking safer,” Hogarth said.

He said in the post that the risk of criminal AI abuse is “acute” and “to protect the banking system's integrity we must harness AI as a tool to counteract these threats.” 

“Our data ethics principles have been used in ANZ for well over five years and continue to be applied to every single AI use case. 

“We’ve also established a multi-disciplinary AI Risk Advisory forum to review all gen-AI use cases to ensure all concepts meet our risk appetite and values,” he said. 

The second point raised for ANZ over 2024 will see the major bank “drive value from AI to advance ANZ’s purpose, aligned to our strategic priorities.”

Hogarth ANZ's mission “is clear” with ANZ ready to “pursue AI as a mechanism to help us in move more swiftly to achieve our goals.”

At the start of last year, ANZ made the call to not black ChatGPT with the organisation and enabled its teams “to explore and learn about this game-changing technology.”

“In March we established an AI Centre of Experiment in Bengaluru to build a virtual team tasked with exploring AI proof of concepts. 

“We connected with major technology partners, ran a hackfest and built a backlog of ideas. One of the capabilities we delivered was our private and safe in-house chatbot, Z-GPT,” Hogarth said. 

He added the engineering teams developed an experiment with GitHub Copilot, “demonstrating up to a 55 per cent timesaving on certain programming tasks.”

“We immediately started the rollout of this AI tool to some 3,000 engineers – and our largest take-up has been in the ANZ Plus team delivering our markedly new way of banking.”

Hogarth added the bank has also “explored a range of business concepts, from augmenting our customer experiences through to helping us with our cybercrime defences.”

“We have seen uncanny improvement in how we can search through documents and policies using an AI pattern called Retrieval Augmented Generation, which allows us to ask natural language questions to find information. 

“We also saw half a dozen groundbreaking concepts demoed at Unconference 2023, our premier internal engineering event,” he said. 

He added that by the end of the year, the bank released a “limited activation of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a desktop AI tool.”

In the post Hogarth said he is “firmly of the opinion that our bank, our industry and our region must think about how we will be at the forefront of the AI revolution, enabling the best outcomes for our community.”