CommBank creates opportunities for technologists to upskill with frontier AI companies

Technologists at the new San Francisco Tech Hub learn from partners such as OpenAI and Anthropic to support adoption of emerging AI technologies. It builds on CommBank’s Seattle Tech Hub, where more than 100 CommBank technologists have already upskilled in areas including generative AI, agentic engineering, cloud-native development and platform engineering.

While in San Francisco, CommBank's team has been focused on AI-powered engineering, getting emerging tools into engineers' hands so they can move from idea to prototype faster, spend less time on manual work, and focus on what actually matters: applying their judgement and deep knowledge of the customer.

Building capabilities to power customer experiences

Global collaboration, immersive learning and proximity to leading technology ecosystems help strengthen CommBank’s technology capability, with tangible benefits brought back home into the organisation, says Martha McKeen, CommBank Executive Manager, AI Powered Engineering.

The purpose of the Tech Hubs is to unlock learning and expose CommBank’s people to the global leaders in applied AI and other game changing technologies, McKeen says.

“We've brought our people to the heart of the startup community, a hotbed of applied AI where all of these incredible ideas emerge, and our people are absolutely thriving,” she says. “We want to speed up the loop between technology, capability building and providing amazing customer experiences and products.”

“Along with exposure to frontier capabilities, the Tech Hubs are validation of CommBank’s strategy to unlock capability for our people and customer value when it comes to using AI – we're not just leading within Australia, we are leading globally when it comes to applied AI, especially in engineering.”

CommBank is recognised as the number one Asia-Pacific bank for AI maturity, according to the 2025 Evident AI Index. The Index benchmarks 50 global banks across Talent, Innovation, Leadership and Transparency. It has recognised CommBank for its leadership in Talent Development and Responsible AI Leadership – ranking it as #1 on these two measures, alongside a number of other banks.

CommBank is deploying AI at scale to help strengthen fraud detection and protect customers from increasingly sophisticated scams and financial crime. Processing more than 20 million payments each day on average, the bank uses machine learning models and human-supervised agentic AI to help detect suspicious activity and respond to threats in near real time.

AI-powered systems now generate more than 40,000 proactive alerts daily on average, helping reduce fraud losses by more than 20% in the first half of FY2026 compared with the same period the year prior. CommBank is also using AI to help disrupt scam networks directly and support broader industry efforts to strengthen Australia’s digital security and resilience.

Thriving on the world stage

Meaningful career opportunities and global exposure exists at CommBank and is no longer confined to big tech or overseas organisations.

“We’re investing in our absolute best and brightest, giving them the opportunity to connect with tech leaders that are on the global stage,” McKeen says.

“We’re providing our senior technologists with exceptional opportunities to develop their skills at the frontier and we’re incredibly proud of that.”

“Ultimately, it's an opportunity to bring that experience back to Australia and share that learning with their colleagues to unlock and force multiply that capability and learning across our technology workforce.”

The Tech Hub investments are not just in CommBank’s organisation, people and customers, but also an investment more broadly in Australia’s future.

“We believe CommBank’s investment in the Tech Hubs sends a really strong signal to Australia that CommBank is invested in supporting the next generation of technologists and cultivating the most innovative ideas and capabilities within the Australian Technology ecosystem,” McKeen says.

“CommBank plays a strong role in helping Australia accelerate its position as a tech leader globally.”

Working in regulated industries raises the bar

Senior technologists once had a mantra ‘move fast and break things’, but today they are increasingly choosing meaningful roles based on ownership, accountability and impact, not hype.

The San Francisco Tech Hub provides a practical example of how CommBank invests in learning, collaboration and engineering judgement to empower our technologists to own outcomes, not just optimise components.

CommBank offers senior technologists the opportunity to lead, shape and be accountable for critical technology at national scale. It operates under real world constraints of regulation, security and public trust – all of which McKeen says is an opportunity for technologists, not a limitation.

“We’re building systems that we want to be secure, reliable and trusted by millions of customers,” she says. “That raises the bar, but it also makes the work more meaningful.”

“When you’re building and running products used by millions of Australians every day, being wrong may have real consequences for real people. So trust, security and resilience aren’t bolted on at the end, they’re what you design for from the first whiteboard.”

We see this approach to building responsible, secure and resilient systems as a competitive advantage in modern technology leadership. Part of this involves pushing outcome ownership right to the people closest to the work.

“If you’re an engineer at CommBank, we want you thinking about the customer problem end-to end; not whether your API is fast, but whether the thing the customer is actually trying to do works,” McKeen says.

"This is a place for technologists who want to look back in five years and know that what they built mattered to millions of customers and to the Australian economy.”