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A new frontier AI agent unveiled by Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week has been tested in an early non-production environment by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)
CBA has trialled the new bot, which is marketed as agentic AI capable of more complex tasks and boasting the ability to run autonomously, as a “DevOps agent”.
AWS said the goal for the new AI bot is to be an “always-on, autonomous on-call engineer” capable of handling incident management, including identifying root causes, recommending targeted mitigations, reducing mean time to resolution and more.
“Frontier agents represent a new class of AI agents that are autonomous, massively scalable, and work for hours or days without constant intervention,” AWS said.
“When issues arise, [the new AI bot] automatically correlates data across your operational toolchain, from metrics and logs to recent code deployments in GitHub or GitLab.
“The agent also manages incident coordination, using Slack channels for stakeholder updates and maintaining detailed investigation timelines.”
Following AWS announcements that CBA was an early tester of the bot, the bank’s head of cloud services, Jason Sandery, stated that AI worked like a veteran DevOps engineer.
“AWS DevOps Agent thinks and acts like a seasoned DevOps engineer, helping our engineers build a banking infrastructure that’s faster, more resilient, and designed to deliver better experiences for our customers,” he said.
“This isn’t just about faster resolution times – it’s about maintaining the trust our customers put in us.”
According to iTnews, the CBA tests have so far been limited to a non-production environment, but added that the bank would like to enable the bot in production following testing.
“While prototyping their next-generation internal cloud platform, the [CBA] team replicated a complex network and identity management issue to test AWS DevOps agent,” AWS said.
“These types of issues can take a seasoned DevOps engineer hours to identify, and the agent found the root cause in under 15 minutes.”
CBA has had a patchy history with AI implementation, having cut at least 45 jobs in favour of AI as part of its efforts to cut labour costs, according to critics.
Prior to that, the bank also cut 304 staff of its 38,000 in Australia, before creating 110 new jobs in India, despite record profits of $9.8 billion in the 2024–25 fiscal year.
Following a poor rollout that saw call volumes increase in its customer service centres, leading to CBA management asking team leaders to pick up the phones and offering overtime, and a wave of worker and union backlash, CBA rolled back the AI implementation, offering staff either their jobs back or the option to take a voluntary exit payment.
“This is a massive win for workers, proving what can be achieved when members stand together – but let’s be clear, this is no victory lap,” said Finance Sector Union (FSU) national secretary Julia Angrisano.
“CBA has been caught out trying to dress up job cuts as innovation. Using AI as a cover for slashing secure jobs is a cynical cost-cutting exercise, and workers know it.”
This story was originally published on Cyber Daily’s sister brand, AI Daily.
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