Senior leaders from Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, QBE Insurance Group and commercial property investment firm Charter Hall discussed the importance of embracing change, particularly as it relates to emerging technologies and their associated strategies, during the Gartner Symposium/Xpo in Australia in September 2024.
“I love change,” said Victoria Ledda, CIO of retail banking at CBA. “I know not everyone thinks that way, but I think we need to build that resilience and think about change as part of what we do.”
Leverage GenAI for better customer experiences
The rise of AI has brought about significant changes to the way Australian businesses operate.
Ledda explained that CBA has been using AI for several years to achieve goals such as personalizing customer experiences on digital channels and improving fraud and scam detection. The bank recently announced a new AI factory in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, which provides the computing power for employees to safely test and develop AI solutions.
Ledda said the advent of generative AI has allowed CBA to think more creatively about how to further improve the customer experience, particularly for more complex interactions. For example, the bank is currently testing a system as part of the home-buying process and enhancing its AI-powered messaging capabilities across all of its digital channels.
“For those who do not want to call a call center or visit a [bank] branch, they will be able to do so in a more autonomous and self-sufficient manner,” Ledda explained.
“I think that for the more complex interactions that customers have with us, such as buying a home or handling a dispute, we believe that generative AI can play a key role in simplifying the interaction with CBA. It could help create a more enjoyable and pleasant experience for our customers.”
SEE: Big IT challenges Australia should tackle to seize the AI moment
CBA believes generative AI can also be used to improve employee satisfaction.
“We’re seeing a lot of use cases for GenAI,” Ledda said. “These include those within our engineering team, who are using GenAI to help them with co-writing, testing, etc., and also our frontline staff, who are using GenAI to serve our customers more efficiently and effectively, so they can focus on the moments that matter.”
Support a broader group of business stakeholders
Change requires having the right talent. Tara Le Friedman, who leads the modernisation of QBE’s AUSPAC division, explained that leaders must foster talent in the support roles essential to running a modern technology function.
“These are the risk, finance, procurement and other professionals who really help support us and drive a highly efficient technology function,” Le Friedman said.
Le Friedman said IT leaders should enlist financial business partners to support initiatives such as cloud cost optimization, and risk and compliance partners to help facilitate ethical use of GenAI. Likewise, procurement professionals play a key role in ensuring organizations partner effectively with SaaS vendors, enabling those vendors to better support the technology ecosystem and improve overall performance.
“This is not new, but it is often forgotten,” she said. “I know that many of these people don’t actually work in technology roles, but we need to stand up for them so that we can get the support we need.”
Consider alternative technology strategies
Christopher Johnson, group chief technology officer at Charter Hall, said IT leaders should consider having multiple technology strategies in place for different future scenarios. He said this would ensure preparedness and agility in an environment characterised by “enough uncertainty”.
SEE: Top IT trends in Australia that IT professionals need to face in 2024
Given that Charter Hall’s business is heavily influenced by interest rates and Australia has experienced a higher interest rate environment over the past two years, Johnson stressed the importance of having technology strategies prepared for various possible future interest rate scenarios.
Determining strategy requires extensive internal and external consultation, Johnson added. He noted that IT leaders must distill various definitions of success and risk tolerance to effectively prioritize appropriate technology investments going forward.
Embrace innovation and embrace failure
The need for innovation and continuous improvement requires organizations to set high standards for education and learning within their teams, according to Ledda.
Innovation is not something that “happens in isolation,” he said.
“We need to integrate it into everything we do, into every team… it has to be a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.”
Ledda said his teams have implemented the objectives and key results, or OKR, system, and the expectation is that being ambitious will mean teams don't meet 100% of their goals.
“If you’re meeting all your goals, it means you’re not ambitious, you’re not trying hard, you’re not failing or learning,” he said. “We’re trying to drive a culture of ‘let’s try something we haven’t done before.’”
Questioning conventional ways of working
Le Friedman said technology provides IT leaders with the means to challenge conventional ways of working or thinking about their businesses, particularly by asking “what if?”
For example, insurance leaders can ask questions like, “What if we didn’t need an underwriter to underwrite our policies?” or “What if we didn’t need a technologist to do technology?”
“With low-code and no-code capabilities, we’re bringing a lot of what technologists used to do in-house, which frees up our technologists to do more complex things,” he explained. “That allows us to really diversify in terms of what we can actually do to bring business and technology together.”
Generative AI capabilities, in particular, will allow IT leaders to ask what-if questions, Le Friedman said, allowing technologists to “really challenge what we used to think was non-negotiable.”
