Westpac is deepening its collaboration with cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, which will provide its “generative AI” technologies to the bank to write better letters to customers and help software engineers develop code.
Generative AI, one of the most hyped technologies of the year, “is transformative in a number of areas,” said Westpac chief technology officer David Walker.
However, the tech boss said generative AI also has many risks, including a capacity to “hallucinate” by making up things from what it discerns. This means Westpac would never “let it loose” on customers and always ensure human oversight.
Despite risks around the ethical application, Westpac is experimenting more with generative AI tools after OpenAI’s ChatGPT system set the AI world on fire over the summer.
Initially, they will be deployed to help Westpac’s own staff do things faster.
Westpac will use AWS’s Lex and ChatGPT to draft letters to customers and policies. AWS tool Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Microsoft’s Github Copilot, is already helping the bank’s software engineers write and validate code to make them more productive.
Hallucinating
Mr Walker says tests are keeping in mind generative AI’s significant weaknesses.
“None of these engines understand anything. They are parroting things back in a clever way, but there is no depth of understanding, there is no comprehension,” he said.
“Another known weakness is it hallucinates. It can make things up and generate a fake quote that has never existed. You can’t fully trust it.
“There is no way we would allow that to be in front of customers. In all AI, we have humans involved in the steps. We don’t let the AI loose directly on customers. We are very careful.”
Nevertheless, the bank is developing customer chatbots and will use Amazon’s Lex system (the wholesale version of its Alexa product offered to retail users), “an important capability we can provide customers who use Alexa in-house,” Mr Walker said.
“We can allow customers to speak to that and give customers a response. We see overtime integrating Google and Microsoft speech engines, that provide a voice to our conversational AI.”
The emerging use cases for conversational AI come as Westpac and AWS signed a new, five-year agreement to support the bank’s hybrid, multi-cloud strategy, which will be announced on Monday.
“When combined with Amazon Connect, our cloud contact centre, banking customers can automate their interactive voice response, simplify their contact centre operations and reduce costs,” said Rianne Van Veldhuizen, AWS managing director in Australia and New Zealand.
“This also helps drive quicker first-time contact resolution rates, helping deliver a great experience to the bank’s customers.”
This time last year, Westpac inked a similar five-year deal with US tech giant Microsoft to use its Azure cloud and various services that help the bank crunch data.
Westpac is not alone in flying into the cloud. National Australia Bank and AWS signed a similar long-term contract. Macquarie said this month it is close to having all applications into the cloud, including its core deposits and loan ledgers, which is helping it compete to write mortgages.
Westpac said AWS would host its new transaction platform for institutional customers, which is being developed by 10x Banking.
Westpac’s identity access management tools for staff and customers, and several of the bank’s websites, are already in AWS.
Banks see the cloud as a potential cost-saver, given they only pay for the computing power they use. This can reduce IT infrastructure costs, especially in the early stages of a product. Cloud also has better security, and makes it easier to attract IT developers, who typically prefer working in a cloud environment compared to a banking mainframe.
“Cloud is like a supercharger,” Mr Walker said. “We see costs as neutral or better. It can improve costs – but you need to build for it.”