The bank moved to play down queries by investors sceptical of claims about the sustainability of the computing and water resources used to power it deep dive into artifical intelligence. "The use by CBA of AI does not presently involve only renewable energy," the bank clarifies. "CBA’s 2024 Climate Report notes that CBA purchases the equivalent of 100% renewable electricity for our Australian operations, which include CBA’s AI-related energy in its Australian data centres. "However, much of CBA’s AI compute capacity is provided by third party providers. A number of our computing capacity providers have made commitments to source renewable or low emissions energy. We also seek to minimise water impacts in our operations and report annually on water usage in our commercial and data centre operations."

The bank has been utilising AI for a number of years to better protect customers from fraud and scams, and in detecting technology-facilitated abuse.

In October last year it revealed that it was studying the use of generative AI to create ’synthetic customers’ capable of emulating human behaviour, to test the response to new products and services. In September the bankmade a further step, announcing that it had teamed up with Amazon Web Services to launch an inhouse ’AI Factory’ with the aim of accelerating the adoption of Generative AI.

The bank is now understood be trialling a ChatGPT-style AI chat bot that could soon replace thousands of local call centre staff.