ANZ to put 3000 leaders through an AI "immersion centre"

ANZ Banking Group will put 3000 leaders through a new AI "immersion centre" at its Melbourne headquarters over the next 12 months.

The role of the immersion centre, which is being set up in partnership with Microsoft, is to get leaders across the bank “to accelerate AI adoption” within their own teams and functional areas.

The centre “will enable the bank’s senior leaders to better support adoption and innovation by their teams and to transform banking services,” ANZ said.

Leaders that go through the centre will be given a Copilot for Microsoft 365 licence to help them “understand what’s possible and how to use generative AI safely, through hands-on learning experiences”.

ANZ’s group executive of technology Gerard Florian said the bank is “actively embracing generative AI across all lines of our business to improve how we serve and protect our customers, process work and meet regulatory standards.”

Both Microsoft and ANZ talked about a “shared commitment” in relation to the centre. 

iTnews understands the centre will be led by ANZ’s Technology team, with workforce tribe lead Carina Parisella overseeing the delivery of the facility and its programming.

Members of the Technology leadership team and AI experts from across the business, along with Microsoft personnel, will also contribute to the centre's resourcing.

The impending expansion of the use of Copilot for M365 follows ANZ’s participation in a Microsoft-run “early access program” for the platform.

In a blog post published by Microsoft, ANZ indicated a number of standard use cases for Copilot for M365 came out of its participation, such as information summarisation and collation.

However, a more novel use case is potentially in the transitioning of Suncorp Bank into ANZ, which began in the past week or so.

“Like any acquisition, this involves the lengthy process of comparing and normalising vast amounts of documentation between the two organisations, including policies, standards and risk documentation,” Microsoft blog post states.

“Traditionally, businesses would have completed this process manually, making it costly and open to human error. 

“But by using generative AI tools like Copilot, the banking group is making this process faster, while driving greater consistency and accuracy.”

ANZ published its own blog post pointing to the bank’s ongoing investments in AI.

The bank has been particularly strong at applying generative AI within software development, including a GitHub Copilot deployment, and the creation of Ensayo AI that targets improvements in the software development lifecycle.