AustralianSuper to boost productivity by 5 percent

AustralianSuper has plans to uplift productivity by 5 percent and boost member outcomes by uplifting productivity and cybersecurity through emerging AI technologies. 

While the superannuation fund said it has long used AI, the organisation said in a recent Microsoft article with the release of generative AI through ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilots and other solutions, the fund plans to leverage these tools to improve member outcomes.

The fund manages around $325 billion in assets for roughly over 3.3 million members. 

At first, 100 employees participated in AustralianSuper’s Copilot for Microsoft 365 trial in late 2023. This expanded but due to around 260 active users due to high interest. 

Copilot for Microsoft 365 has been used to summarise the documents within five minutes which would usually take an hour and a half. 

AustralianSuper is also using generative AI to explore cybersecurity options through its participation in Microsoft’s Security Copilot EAP.

Under the direction of a small cyber defence team in a hybrid model plus other managed service partners, the company is looking at Security Copilot to help take some tedious tasks away. 

It so far has used Kusto Query Language scripts, used within Microsoft Sentinel for log analysis and identifying core vulnerabilities.  

AustralianSuper chief technology officer Mike Backeberg told Digital Nation that, “AustralianSuper has set a goal of increasing productivity by 5 percent across its organisation using AI within the next 12 months which equates to about two hours per week per colleague.”

He said the company “see AI as the future” and “not just a new tool and while it may change what people do in their roles and how they work”.

“We don’t see any major changes to our organisational structure through our journey to becoming an AI organisation. 

“AI is a fundamentally new way of work and our priority is ensuring we take all employees along on the journey at AustralianSuper.

"As part of this, we are also focused on providing education and upskilling programs to ensure we understand what our teams need to help become AI literate,” Backeberg said. 

New Shift

Since Backeberg stepped into the CTO role in 2022, the company transitioned into a new technology operating model known as ‘engage, enable, deliver’, designed to improve AustralianSuper’s global service delivery capabilities and member engagement. 

This saw the business move from using on-premises data centres towards scalable, cloud-based solutions on platforms such as Microsoft Azure.

In the Microsoft article, Backeberg said, “AI will play a pivotal role in the fund’s quest for operational excellence, offering unparalleled opportunities to enhance efficiency, create better member experiences and drive better-informed decision-making.

“We aim to be thought leaders in the generative AI space,” added Backeberg. 

“Our core priority is to use it to improve member outcomes, both through the way we provide services and how we are using it to free up our people to focus more on higher-value tasks.”

AustralianSuper has already set up an AI engineering team and was invited as one of only 600 organisations globally to participate in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Early Access Program (EAP).

“Our AI maturity is only at level one on the five-point scale that we’re using, so we’ll be undertaking a program to get ourselves up the maturity scale and increase the use of AI,” said Backeberg.

“We believe it will take about 18 months for all our people to properly adopt generative AI because we have to think carefully about how we embed it into our processes. 

“For example, new employees will require it as part of their toolset, so we need to provide the right onboarding, education and training to ensure they get value out of technologies like Copilot for Microsoft 365,” he said. 

He explained that “Increasing productivity by 5 per cent will pay for the actual technology multiple times over. 

“With that kind of ROI, we don’t have to be too aggressive. Over the next few years, it’s probably going to be more like a 20 to 30 per cent increase in productivity, depending on the evolution and availability of AI technology,” Backeberg said.