Josie, New Zealand banking's first digital personal assistant, created by Kiwi company FaceMe for ASB.

Meet Josie, ASB's new digital assistant.

She's a New Zealand banking first, and will make an appearance in around a month's time to guide future business owners through the process of starting a business.

In ethnicity, Josie is a "New Zealander". She's been carefully designed mirror a little of everyone. She's a little bit Maori, a little bit Pacific Island, a little bit Asian, a little bit Pakeha.

SUPPLIED Meet Josie, ASB's digital assistant. She's not Maori, Pacific Island, Asian, or Pakeha. She's all merged together into a single ethnic "New Zealander".

Her environment will be the bank branch, homed behind a screen business banking customers can just walk up to and start talking.

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She's so quick on the uptake that she responds to questions in less than 100millisecond making the interaction feel very natural, ASB said.

. THis is Vai, MPI's digital assistant, deployed to answer questions of arriving travellers at Auckland International Airport.

In technical jargon, Josie is a "personalised, human-like interface powered by artificial intelligence", and utilizes "audio analytics and computer vision capabilities to be aware of her surroundings and the people speaking to her".

She'll even see from customers' faces whether what she's saying is boring them, says Danny Tomsett from New Zealand business FaceMe, which developed Josie for ASB.

It was FaceMe's second deployment of an artificial intelligence persona in New Zealand, following the deployment of "Vai" as a digital biosecurity officer for the Ministry for Primary Industries at Auckland International Airport to answer questions from arriving passengers.

But Josie was an Australasian banking first, Tomsett said.

ASB executive general manager retail banking Russell Jones says Josie's job would be to help the bank's business customers to launch into business.

"Our SME customers have been asking for easy access to relevant information so we're engaging with New Zealand's large SME population to understand the range of questions they have when setting up and managing a business," he said.

"We're excited to develop this technology, but more importantly we're eager to see what Josie will help our customers achieve," he said.

"Globally, New Zealanders are known for innovation and entrepreneurship: we have brilliant ideas but sometimes lack the knowledge for profitable execution."

Tomsett said AI machines would do an increasing amount of the banking work currently done by humans, but that did not mean necessarily mean a reduction in human staff numbers. Instead organisations could simply do more, leaving their human workers to focus on the things that humans did best, like providing customer experience.

Worldwide there's been debate over whether it is sexist that AI assistants are almost invariably created as female, but testing by businesses like ASB showed that was what the majority of the public wanted.

Ironically, Josie was named after the first-ever full-time ASB Bank employee, a man named Joseph Coombes.

In time, Tomsett predicted that organisations would have whole teams of AI assistants tailored to individual customers' ages, genders, ethnicity, and languages.