{"id":786964,"date":"2026-07-08T12:48:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T12:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/786964\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T12:48:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T12:48:22","slug":"bendigo-bank-scoping-more-than-3000-ideas-for-ai-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/786964\/","title":{"rendered":"Bendigo Bank scoping more than 3000 ideas for AI use"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bendigo Bank has a pipeline of more than 3000 ideas to use agentic AI to \u201cmake the organisation better\u201d and is running them through a series of gates to determine prioritisation.<\/p>\n

\"Bendigo<\/p>\n


\n Bendigo’s chief technology officer Kieran O’Meara. \n <\/p>\n

Chief technology officer Kieran O’Meara told the Google Cloud Summit Sydney that the 3000 ideas were crowdsourced from its workforce of \u201cover 5000\u201d staff in the space of nine months.<\/p>\n

He said that this number of ideas was only possible because the bank put AI tools – notably Google Cloud’s Gemini<\/a> – into the hands of all staff and invested in upskilling and education.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we didn’t do was we didn’t put [AI] in a lab. We didn’t run experiments in the traditional sense,\u201d O\u2019Meara said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe very deliberately went wide and we started at the top with education, including the board and the executives, because these leaders needed to know how to lead this work.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Meara said the ideas were not for enhanced \u201cpersonal productivity or team level innovation\u201d, although AI had a role to play there.<\/p>\n

Instead, he said, the efforts needed to have an impact for Bendigo Bank as an organisation.<\/p>\n

Now, the focus has shifted on what to fund and progress.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Meara said that the ideas were being progressed and considered for funding only if they passed a series of gates.<\/p>\n

These gates include whether the idea really requires agentic technology or not.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe single most common thing that happens is we have hammers looking for nails,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery idea is an agentic idea. Actually, the reality is about 80 percent of what gets pitched is not really an agentic problem. It’s not really an agentic opportunity. It’s a deterministic opportunity. We can solve it in other ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the things that we choose to go forward with are most commonly both: they require both intelligent reasoning or judgment and deterministic work to achieve the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other checks include whether an agentic implementation of the idea would be auditable and, if something went wrong, what the repercussions might be; and the economics of doing the activity agentically.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have seen real examples where the agentic workflow is more expensive than doing it the way we do it today,\u201d O\u2019Meara said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn one particular call centre example, the cost of the interaction agentically was going to be about $9 versus the human-supported interaction [cost] of about $3.50.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another gate is whether the organisation is actually ready to progress the idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’ve fallen into this trap a few times. Do we have the data? Can we build the integrations? Do we understand the semantics? And do we have that multidisciplinary team to achieve the outcome?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201c[This is] essentially how we test what comes in and how we decide what to move forward with to put the real money into achieving the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ry Crozier attended Google Cloud Summit Sydney as a guest of Google Cloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bendigo Bank has a pipeline of more than 3000 ideas to use agentic AI to \u201cmake the organisation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":786965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-786964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}