Westpac chief digital, data and AI officer Andrew McMullan told attendees of a Snowflake customer event in Sydney that the new “agentic data ecosystem” will bolster the bank’s current work on developing an AI layer, describing the new ecosystem as “one single living system” abd a “shared intelligence foundation” for the company’s governance, quality, ownership, data lineage and business definitions.
“Based on our framework of trust, we want to build trust into the way we create and use intelligence, because most organisations don't struggle with a lack of data - [they] struggle with confidence in it," he said, as seen by itnews.
"[They] struggle whether or not [there's] the right controls and lineage; [and on] the time spent trying to debate the numbers instead of acting on the data and making intelligent decisions.
"That is what the agentic data ecosystem is designed to solve at Westpac,” McMullan said.
When Westpac first announced work on an agentic intelligence layer last year, it said it had 251 sources going into it, but that number has now jumped to 285.
As a result, the time to build and roll out AI models has been accelerated dramatically. Additionally, the process of turning customer data insights into engagement has gotten 6 times faster.
These can then be used to create offer-based marketing campaigns targeting consumers.
“Rather than building it from scratch, the right offer can now call to action and surface from a pre-approved catalogue, matched to the engagement, consistent on brand, already assured, and then we go through all of the inclusions and exclusions and select the audience. And what used to take months now takes days,” McMullan said.
In terms of its workforce, the company also laid out what its been doing to implement AI within its workforce.
The company has developed 3 platforms - “Start Your Day Informed”, “Create a Better Day” and “Sleep Tight at Night”.
The first gives bankers daily updates based on “thousands” of signals from different banking systems.
McMullen did not provide much detail on the other two, other than saying that Create a Better Day was used by multiple teams to analyse the economic activity in different geographical regions, while Sleep Type at Night appeared to be related to risk management and credit control.
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