Senior leaders from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, QBE Insurance Group, and commercial property investment firm Charter Hall spoke on 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 feels that way, but I think we need to develop that resilience and think of change as part of what we do.”

Leverage GenAI for better customer experiences

The rise of AI has led to significant changes in how Australian businesses operate.

CBA has been using AI for several years, Ledda explained, to achieve goals such as personalising customer experiences on digital channels and enhancing fraud and scam detection. The bank recently announced a new AI Factory in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, providing the compute power for employees to conduct safe testing and development of 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 piloting a system as part of the home-buying process and enhancing its messaging capability with AI across its digital channels.

“For those who don’t want to dial a call center or visit a [bank] branch, they’ll be able to do that in a more autonomous and self-sufficient way,” Ledda explained.

“I think that in more complex interactions customers hold with us, like say buying a home or processing a dispute, we think that generative AI can play a key role in simplifying the interaction with CBA. It could help create a more delightful and enjoyable experience for our customers.”

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CBA believes generative AI can also be used to improve employee satisfaction.

“We are seeing a lot of GenAI use cases,” Ledda said. “These include those within our engineering team — using GenAI to help them with co-writing, testing and, so forth — and also our frontline staff, using GenAI to serve our customers more efficiently and effectively, so they can focus on the moments that matter.”

Support a wider cohort of business stakeholders

Change requires having the right talent in place. Tara Le Friedman, who is heading the modernisation of QBE’s AUSPAC division, explained that leaders should champion talent in the support roles essential for operating a modern technology function.

“These are the risk, the finance, the procurement professionals, and others that really help to support us and drive a highly efficient technology function,” Le Friedman said.

Le Friedman said IT leaders should enlist finance business partners to support initiatives such as cloud cost optimisation, and risk and compliance partners to help facilitate ethical use of GenAI. Likewise, procurement professionals play a key role in ensuring organisations effectively partner with SaaS vendors, enabling those providers to better support the tech ecosystem and improve overall performance.

“This is not new but often is forgotten,” she said. “I know a lot of these people don’t actually work in technology functions, but we need to advocate for them so we can get the support we require.”

Consider alternative technology strategies

Christopher Johnson, head of group technology at Charter Hall, said IT leaders should consider having multiple technology strategies ready for different future scenarios. He said this would ensure preparedness and agility in an environment characterised by “sufficient uncertainty”.

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Given Charter Hall’s business is heavily influenced by interest rates and Australia having experienced a higher rate environment over the last two years, Johnson emphasised the importance of having technology strategies prepared for various potential future interest rate scenarios.

Determining strategy involves consulting widely both internally and externally, Johnson added. He noted that IT leaders must distill various definitions of success and risk appetites to effectively prioritise appropriate technology investments in the future.

Embed innovation and embrace failure

The need for innovation and continuous improvement requires organisations to set a high bar for education and learning within their teams, according to Ledda.

Innovation is not something that “happens on the side,” she said.

“We need to embed it into everything we’re doing, into every single team… it needs to be a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.”

Ledda said her teams have implemented the objectives and key results or OKR system, and the expectation is that being ambitious will mean teams are not meeting 100% of their goals.

“If you are meeting all your goals, it means you’re not ambitious and you’re not trying and you’re not failing and learning,” she said. “We’re trying to push for a culture of, ‘let’s try something we haven’t done before.’”

Challenge conventional ways of working

Le Friedman said that technology provides IT leaders with the means to challenge conventional ways of working or thinking in their business, particularly by asking ‘what if?’

For example, insurance leaders can ask questions such as, “What if we didn’t need an underwriter to underwrite our policies?” or “What if we don’t need a technologist to do tech?”

“With low-code and no-code capabilities, we’re moving a lot of what was previously done by technologists into our business, which frees up our technologists to do more complex things,” she explained. “So 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, enabling technologists to “really challenge what we used to think was non-negotiable.”