Macquarie Bank saves 130,000 hours in seven months of Gemini Enterprise use

Macquarie Bank says that “close to 80 percent” of its 5000 staff use Google’s Gemini Enterprise on a daily basis, seven months on from signing up to use the technology.

Director of product for enterprise AI enablement Shahnwaz Ali told the Google Cloud Next ‘26 conference in Las Vegas that the bank had so far “delivered 130,000 productivity hours back to people” by using Gemini Enterprise to automate mostly manually-repetitive tasks.

“They now can focus on what matters the most to us, [which] is delivering exceptional digital experiences to our clients,” Ali said.

The bank’s approach to adoption has been to offer Gemini Enterprise to all staff, training and certifying them in the use of the technology, and asking them - as subject matter experts in their respective domains - to determine use cases and test “solutions”.

He said that an “innovation lab” hackathon run weeks after launching Gemini Enterprise resulted in “hundreds of solutions” built “not by a tech team or an AI team” but instead “by the experts in legal, marketing, compliance, and sales.”

Ali demonstrated two examples of enterprise agents built with Gemini Enterprise onstage.

One was for a team of 30 people that handle undisclosed “sensitive matters”, with the agent able to collate information and suggest appropriate wording for responses. 

Ali suggested a future Outlook integration could further assist this use case, allowing emails to be sent from within the AI-assisted workflow.

The second example dealt with the bank’s legal team and their ability to participate in an incident response, in terms of understanding potential exposure to legal risk.

Ali said that it presently involved “a lot of manual processes” and a team “heavily under pressure” with workload.

“With the enterprise agents, what they need to do is just put a small amount of information into that chatbot and it'll bring up everything,” he said.

Ali said that Google had supported the bank in its adoption of Gemini Enterprise and in ironing out challenges encountered so far.

He also revealed that the bank sought to smooth the introduction of the technology internally as well, both through its engagement of leaders and staff in structured training, but also specifically by running a pilot of the technology with personnel that would have to sign off on the risks of adopting the technology.

“We obviously anticipated challenges with our risk partners - so, the legal team, the risk team, the compliance team,” Ali said.

“The key part was taking all of our risk partners onto the pilot, so they were not the people sitting at the side trying to review something. 

“We said, ‘You are our first set of people. We want to get you onto the tool.’ 

“So, when they got onto the tool, they got a better understanding of how they're going to risk review [it] because for us in a regulated industry that's super critical that we do a proper risk assessment.”