Immersive AI learning and collaboration
CommBank team members have spent two weeks at the SanFrancisco hub, participating in collaborative learning opportunities with leading AI labs.
CommBank Lead for AI Powered Engineering & International Tech Hubs Martha McKeen, said the experience was designed to help solve challenges and unlock opportunities at home. “Our tech hubs are all about creating incredible surfaces for learning. We bring our best technologists from Australia to embed really deeply with our strategic partners,” she said.
“The goal for us is to have them take away all the learning that they can from our strategic partners, and bring that back to Australia, to become force multipliers, and scale and compound that capability across our 10,000-plus technologists.”
CommBank Crew Lead, Core Foundations George Beniac said collaborating with one of the key strategic partners in the venture, OpenAI, during the San Francisco experience has really changed the way his learning squad is thinking about how it can use AI from planning to product design, to code development, and deployment.
“It’s been fantastic to partner closely with OpenAI and really deeply understanding how they areleveraging AI assistants to accelerate the way they work and rapidly prototype new features,” Beniac said.
“What surprised me most about the experience in San Francisco is probably how our partners are able to rapidly iterate and work together across all parts of their business towards a singular outcome.”
Henry Chan, Product Owner AI Powered Engineering, led a learning squad including product owners, engineers and data scientists.
“Very quickly, from the moment you land in San Francisco you notice all the billboards are AI-related. You realise this environment is, by default, AI-powered,” he said. “Your brain automatically switches.”
“One of the things that we specifically came to San Francisco to learn was how other leading companies are able to move so quickly, how they’ve changed or altered or augmented their product delivery life cycles over the last couple of years,” Chan said.
The one insight that has stuck with him is how important it is to give team members the freedom to experiment. “Prototyping is a way that AI has allowed people to translate their thoughts into real life use cases. Only by giving team members time to explore a prototype will we be able to get the next best idea.”