Optus lands CBA's Jesse Arundell for its new AI division

Optus has brought former Commonwealth Bank head of emerging tech Jesse Arundell into its new artificial intelligence unit. 

Holding the title of head of emerging AI, Arundell will join the leadership ranks in Optus' AI-dedicated division, which officially launched on November 1 this year.

According to Optus, Arundell will be tasked with “embed[ding]” AI more widely across its business and expanding it into “new areas”.

Arundell previously spent almost a decade at CBA, where he scaled up the bank's emerging technology experiments, playing “matchmaker” between third parties and the bank’s business units.

His division also developed an IT risk stability score, “an advanced machine learning model that predicts the likelihood and potential cause of critical system failures inside the bank”.

The project won top honours in the 2021 iTnews Benchmark Awards.

Arundell’s appointment comes as Optus seeks several roles to join its AI division, including in product management, engineering and delivery management.

Samantha Lawson, VP of AI at Optus, said the unit is growing and that “a number of positions [are] currently advertised”.

“We’ve been implementing AI solutions for several years and our growing AI division will allow my team and I to innovate at scale,” she added.

Optus first began the AI division hiring spree in June when its senior director of strategy and digital product Steven Burnside revealed the telco was hunting numerous roles in “product management, design, data, engineering, strategy and partnerships, business operations”.

Writing on LinkedIn at the time, Burnside described the division as being “one of Australia's fastest growing AI product teams”