In 1995, American talk show host David Letterman did a now-iconic interview with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, where he asked him to explain this “internet thing”.
“What the hell is that exactly?” Letterman cheekily asks, in a time where the internet was taking off.
Gates attempts to explain emails and how revolutionary the internet is — before Letterman says that when he heard you can watch a baseball game live on the internet: “I just thought to myself, does radio ring a bell?”
Letterman may have been deliberately flippant, but the interview was also telling about how people hadn’t yet understood how profoundly the internet would transform our lives.
That’s where we are now with generative artificial intelligence, according to Commonwealth Bank’s chief executive Matt Comyn.
“It is fair to say that whilst there is certainly potential with AI, it will take some time before we will be sufficiently confident that we can control for all the risks to be able to manage that safely at scale,” Mr Comyn noted at the bank’s annual general meeting in October.
AI bots could replace thousands of call centre workers
CBA was one of the first big four banks to come out publicly and say it is trialling a ChatGPT-style AI chat bot in its call centres, that could replace thousands of local call centre staff.
It’s early days yet to know the full impact of job losses, although the Finance Sector Union and industry experts predict in banking call centres alone, the impact could be in the thousands.
And those risks Mr Comyn refers to are enormous, especially when it involves machines making decisions about home loan applications.
But CBA is not alone in thinking about how it can use AI to help its workers better answer customer calls, carry out security checks and more quickly assess documents used during the loan application process.
The big four bank bosses that ABC News spoke to relayed how they are already doing such tasks with AI.
But they were quick to point out these tools are there to just assist their staff in making financial decisions, not sign off on them.
ANZ’s chief technology officer Tim Hogarth says AI is currently helping ANZ staff quickly verify documents like pay slips and assess complex loan contracts.
Tim Hogarth says AI is currently helping ANZ staff verify loan documents. (ABC News: Nassim Khadem)
Over time, the technology it will be able to give customers insights into how to spend their money.
“AI can now allow us to actually take information from documents and extract all of that meaning and cutting the amount of time it takes from hours and hours, down to sometimes mere seconds,” Mr Hogarth says.
“In future, AI is going to help you find and spot patterns more readily.
“For example, it might help you understand all those subscriptions that you’ve collected over time and give you some ideas on what you might want to do with those.”
AI already verifying loan documents, so how far away are bot loan approvals?
As AI becomes better at doing tasks that humans do and getting more involved in crucial decisions — like whether to approve a home loan – Mr Hogarth believes that “some jobs will go away, new jobs will come in”.
Like CBA, ANZ is using AI to help 1,200 staff across ANZ’s call centres as an ‘over-the-shoulder’ assistant.
The bank recently opened what it calls its ‘AI immersion centre’ in Docklands, Melbourne, and is training 3,000 workers on how to use AI to do their jobs.
It has joined forces with leading companies across Silicon Valley, including Microsoft, Google and with Amazon, as well as niche startups, to help improve its AI technology.
ANZ’s new AI centre is located at its Docklands office in Melbourne. (Supplied. )
“People have used this technology to very quickly summarise everything about what the bank has on file for the customer and … to help them answer the customer’s questions more quickly and more reliably,” Mr Hogarth says.
AI is also helping ANZ staff with other tasks: it can identify cases of financial hardship so they can interact with a customer before a situation gets dire and the customer may be forced to sell their home. And it can be used as an authentication tool to check people are who they say they are.
He says a world where you can get your home loan through a robot is one he cannot envisage.
“I don’t think that’s likely to happen in the next five to 10 years … having a home loan completely decided by a machine,” Mr Hogarth says.
“It’s very likely, though, that the way we’re going to buy homes will be fundamentally different.”
‘Are they agitated?’: How NAB is using AI to track customer sentiment
National Australia Bank’s executive for data strategy execution, Jessica Gleeson, says NAB is trialling AI to help staff categorise and verify documents.
The aim is to reduce review times from 45 minutes to 5 minutes.
They are also exploring AI’s role in customer identity checks and ’emotional sentiment analysis’ — this is where AI can help interpret and summarise conversations its staff have with customers.
“It’s more (about assessing) the tone of the customer’s voice — if you’re taking a call and a customer is agitated, or they’re upset, or they’re relatively neutral,” Ms Gleeson says.
“Our vision is that we’ll be able to service it up to our bankers so they kind of understand what their call is about, that they’re about to take, and also be able to give the right level of empathy to customers.”
Ms Gleeson says call centre staff may take about 100 calls a day, and they’re dealing with different customers with different needs.
“We need to keep a record of how we’ve interacted.
“If we can use large language models to create that summary, to create those end-of-call notes, the colleague doesn’t need to spend time on that, and they can take the next call and serve more customers,” she says.
Jessica Gleeson says NAB is trailing AI to help staff categorise and verify documents. (ABC News: Scott Preston )
Job losses aren’t part of the plan, according to Ms Gleeson, and she sees AI as a tool to “create capacity in people’s jobs”.
“Jobs are going to morph and merge into different things — where today you might perform a task, all of a sudden, AI is your co-pilot,” she says.
‘Too risky right now’: Calls for banks to be more transparent about AI use
The union for finance sector workers has concerns about the way AI is being used and expects there could be thousands of job losses.
“If some of the large banks were to replace their contact centre staff with AI, that would cost thousands of jobs across Australia,” Finance Sector Union national assistant secretary Nicole McPherson says.
She wants more transparency from the banks, including about how people’s jobs will change.
“We are very worried about people in contact centres, people in administration roles, people in processing roles — we think that they’re the roles that are going to be most quickly impacted by AI.
“We don’t want to see a situation where finance workers or consumers in Australia are simply having AI foisted upon them and they are having to deal with whatever the banks decide is a good idea,” Ms McPherson says.
Could AI robots soon approve your home loan? (OpenAI: DALL·E 2)
Ms McPherson says AI is a tool workers are excited about, but also a technology that is “still quite untested” and so that comes with enormous risk.
“It’s simply too risky right now to be using untested technology, potentially to be slashing jobs and to not be using the most ethical and trained people to do this incredibly important work,” she says.
Small talk, work and the weather: AI currently struggles with chitchat
Using AI for sentiment analysis can also be misleading, Ms McPherson warns.
She cites the example of a recent incident where one of their finance sector members was taking a phone call with a customer that was wrongly interpreted by AI.
“They made a very mundane comment about the weather — how, unfortunately, it’s raining at the moment,” she recalls.
“When this conversation was analysed later on by AI, what the AI said was that this was a ‘negative customer interaction’, because they used the word unfortunately.
“It clearly wasn’t a negative interaction, but this is one of the big challenges with AI at the moment.
“Though it is called artificial intelligence, it still does need that human oversight.”
Fine line between AI helping and straying into financial advice
The potential of AI is exciting — but in reality, there are limitations.
And in the highly-regulated banking world, there are also limitations on which tasks can be performed by a bot, before legal lines are crossed.
Gabriele Sanguigno is the head of startup ToothFairyAI.
He’s created an AI tool to help superannuation funds assess a customer’s financial position, and wants to pitch his tool to the big four banks.
Gabriele Sanguigno wants to pitch his AI tool to the big banks. (ABC News: Nassim Khadem)
He is also feeding into government inquiries on the issue.
He says AI agents can be helpful in speeding up the home loan process, but they can’t offer financial advice or sign off on loans.
“The AI agent can come up with some possible scenarios,” Mr Sanguigno notes.
“It [AI] can come up even with some options in terms of how you can refinance your loan.
“However, you always need to keep the human in the loop to make sure that the last check is done by a person.”
He says while there’s much hype about how many jobs might be lost because of AI, it will have a big impact and that could happen sooner than people expect.
“The idea of thinking that this technology will not have an impact on the job market? I think it’s ludicrous,” Mr Sanguigno says.
Joe Sweeney, an analyst at technology consultancy IBRS, also believes call centre jobs will be lost.
He says a big issue is whether answers provided by AI that feed into decisions about home loans could be deemed financial advice.
That would be a contravention of regulations around who can give financial advice, and potentially responsible lending laws.
Joe Sweeney says AI is not that intelligent but it is good at picking up patterns quickly. (ABC News: Daniel Irvine)
“The banking sector is not allowed to offer financial advice above the most basic levels,” Dr Sweeney says.
“You could create a series of questions that would lead to the AI giving you a response that it really shouldn’t.
“And this is why the design of the AI and the information that is fed to these AIs is so important.”
He says too many people think AI has greater capacity than it actually does.
“There is no intelligence in that artificial intelligence at all — it is simply pattern replication and randomisation … It’s an idiot, plagiarist at best.
“The danger, particularly for financial institutions or any institution that is governed by certain codes of behaviour, is that AI will make mistakes,” Dr Sweeney says.
“And if those mistakes are in breach of regulation, then those organisations have a real problem.”
Can regulation keep up with AI technology?
The rapid pace at which AI is advancing means the technology is moving faster than regulation.
The European Union has introduced laws to regulate artificial intelligence, a model that Australian Human Rights commissioner Lorraine Finlay says Australia could consider.
Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay is worried AI is moving faster than regulation. (ABC News: Mark Moore)
“Australia really needs to be part of that global conversation to make sure that we’re not waiting until the technology goes wrong and until there are harmful impacts, but we’re actually dealing with things proactively,” Ms Finlay says.
The commissioner has been working with Australia’s big banks on testing their AI processes to remove bias during the loan application decision process.
“We’d be particularly concerned with respect to home loans, for example, that you could have disadvantage in terms of people from lower socio-economic areas,” she explains.
“There could be racial discrimination, disability discrimination, gender discrimination.”
She says that however banks decide to use AI, it’s crucial they start disclosing it to customers and make sure “there’s always a human in the loop”.
The horror stories that emerged during the banking royal commission came down to people making bad decisions that left Australians with too much debt and led to them losing their homes and businesses.
If a machine made bad decisions that had disastrous consequences, who would the responsibility fall on? It’s a major question facing the banks.
“Don’t just have a machine making final decisions that will have a really significant impact on people’s lives,” Ms Finlay advises.
