The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA) share price is on watch after the big bank revealed a partnership with a global artificial intelligence (AI) leader.
CBA’s AI partnership
It has formed an ‘exclusive’ partnership and taken a minority stake in H2O.ai, a global-leader.
H2O.ai operates the cloud-based machine learning platform called H2O AI Cloud. CBA said it employs a significant number of the world’s top data scientists.
CBA is looking to utilise H20.ai’s AI cloud across the entire bank. It said the bank will get to use a dedicated H2O.ai team, including industry-renowned ‘Kaggle Grandmasters’, machine learning engineers and product specialists, to work full time on developing new AI solutions within the bank.
The major bank sees broad application for AI and machine learning technology right across the business, such as in operational processes, protecting customers from fraud, lending decisions, and risk management.
CBA believes it will be able to better help customers find personalised and relevant offers to save money while they shop across platforms like Little Birdie, Karta, CommBank Rewards, and Klarna. This can also help grow sales for merchants. It wants to be one of the highest quality, lowest cost sources of leads to our business customers.
H2O.ai will also help the bank to predict bills and forecast cash flows for both retail and business customers so they can plan ahead.
Comments from H2O.ai
H2O.ai Founder and CEO Sri Ambati said:
“CommBank and H2O.ai are led by our core belief that we can make the world better while serving our communities and customers with excellence. This strategic partnership between the leading global AI Cloud movement and Australia’s largest bank will unleash the juggernaut of co-innovation in AI for Payments and further democratise AI with trust and freedom.
“Our vision is not only to make CBA an AI superpower but make Australia an AI nation as we move to life after COVID.”
Final thoughts on this and the CBA share price
Technology could be the key to success and growth in most industries. CBA’s plan seems like a good move, though it’ll be hard to tell externally how well it’s working.
I think the big four bank is doing what it needs to do to be successful. But, in my opinion, investors may have sent the CBA share price a little too high considering how big the bank already is. I don’t think it can achieve a lot of long-term growth from here.
