"They have probably now progressed to high school graduates. However, bringing them into our environment, we still have the similar challenge to the teenager in terms of it taking multiple years of further teaching about our business to graduate to a bachelor or PhD level to achieve the outcomes we are after."

Under chief information officer Dave Curran, Westpac has overhauled the bank's internal systems in a way that makes it easier for it to track and deal with individual customers, regardless of the technology platform they use to interact with it.

Data use

Mr Whiteley described a "dedicated transformation program" under way, focused specifically on where data held both within the bank and externally, can be governed and used to serve customers and optimise running the bank.

"As a part of this, we have built a big data capability linked with our enterprise data stores, which provides the capability to accelerate the use of data and AI within the organisation," he said.

"And we are working on how we use machine learning to help improve the quality of the data analytics and leverage data better for customer outcomes through creating contextualised customer experiences."

Future jobs

Much of the general narrative around the advent of AI has focused on the impact of automation on jobs. Mr Whiteley said he believed that the nature of work being conducted by humans would change, and that Westpac had begun working on programs that would reskill its own staff for future jobs.


"There are plenty of new roles in the world of AI, RPA and big data. We will need people with skills to build and maintain the robots, as well as many more data engineers and data scientists," he said.

"There are also ethical challenges that will emerge, and governance that will evolve, all of which will need careful consideration."

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group has previously spoken about its attempts to deploy RPA to enhance, rather than replace its existing workforce.

The issue of employment at the banks was thrown into fresh focus on Monday, with National Australia Bank announcing it needs to make 1000 positions redundant every six months as part of a plan to cut a total of 6000 jobs over three years, while at the same time bolstering its workforce with 2000 technology specialists.