Macquarie Bank rolling out new agentic AI capabilities

Macquarie Bank is collaborating with Google Cloud to roll out agentic AI capabilities aimed at elevating the customer experience while enhancing employer productivity.

The bank will become one of the first retail banks in Australia to roll out Google’s recently launched Gemini Enterprise solution to its employees. The company has made the decision to roll out Gemini Enterprise to every employee across its Australian retail banking business.

Macquarie Bank plans to use Gemini Enterprise to develop custom agents in two main categories. The first are Personal Agents, designed to enhance individual productivity. Employees are already using these agents to summarise documents, conduct research and draft content. Meanwhile, Enterprise Agents are being developed to tackle more complex business challenges, which could include system design documentation, document analysis, discovery and code generation.

These tools could also be used to enhance customer experiences by summarising client conversations and improving how customers can interact with the bank and find answers to their queries.

Macquarie Banking and Financial Services Head of Technology Richard Heeley said the AI agents have the potential to help the company stand out in the highly competitive retail banking industry.

“Ultimately we need to be able to scale fast and scale smartly. So how do we do this in a thoughtful and strategic way? We think the answer is to provide our employees with the most advanced AI tools to increase our pace of delivery and allow our teams to have more time to focus on high-value tasks, which will ultimately lead to better customer outcomes,” he said.

The company has set the target of having all employees integrate AI into their daily workflows within six months. To help facilitate AI adoption, Macquarie Bank is building its employees’ AI skills with the Google Skills platform.

Nearly all current employees have also completed a training course covering using generative AI at the business, and around 3000 employees have attended Gemini Enterprise demos. The company has also launched an AI upskilling pathway for employees, and its leadership team will all undertake Google Cloud’s Generative AI Leader Certification.

“It’s vital that all our employees have the foundational capabilities to effectively leverage AI in their roles, and we’re making this possible by encouraging all our employees to become AI-literate by building custom learning paths, so our entire workforce is ready for this new world,” Heeley said.

Gemini Enterprise combines several AI technologies, including Google’s own Gemini models, first- and third-party agents, and conversational AI and orchestration technology, to allow agents to access and synthesise information from internal systems and Google AI tools like Code Assist and Deep Research within a single enterprise workflow.

Macquarie Bank has been building its internal services on Google Cloud since 2019 as part of its multi-year partnership with the company.

Image credit: Macquarie Bank