Commonwealth Bank has become the first Australian bank to publish a detailed account of how it builds, deploys and governs artificial intelligence, releasing a report from its Sydney head office that maps a decade of AI work across fraud detection, customer service and cyber security.
The report, Our Approach to Adopting AI, was released on 5 February 2026. It sets out six guiding principles and a governance framework, alongside concrete examples of AI already running inside the country’s largest lender.
The disclosure lands at an awkward moment. In the same window, CBA has confirmed hundreds of job cuts tied to its restructure around AI, and the Finance Sector Union has lodged a formal dispute. The result is a study in contrast between the bank’s optimistic public framing and the harder questions being asked by its own workforce.
What the report actually reveals
The numbers are substantial. CBA says AI now helps process more than 20 million payments a day on average, and sends an average of 40,355 proactive scam warnings to customers through the CommBank app each day.
The bank credits that work with helping cut customer fraud losses by more than 20 per cent in the first half of the 2026 financial year, compared with the same period a year earlier. It invested more than $900 million in fraud, scam and cyber protection in FY2025.
On the customer side, CBA’s generative AI assistant has answered more than 500,000 customer inquiries since July 2024. Its Benefits Finder tool, running since 2019, has helped customers access more than 400 rebates and concessions. The bank has also partnered with cyber intelligence firm Apate.ai, which uses AI bots to engage scammers in real-time conversations.
Alex Matthews, the executive general manager who led the report, framed the exercise around trust. “As Australia’s largest bank, trust is fundamental to how we use AI,” he told SecurityBrief Australia, adding that the approach is grounded in “risk management foundations” and the bank’s AI principles.
Transparency, or getting ahead of the regulator
CBA is pitching the report as an act of openness. Chief executive Matt Comyn said stakeholders “want to better understand how AI is being used across the Bank,” according to SecurityBrief Australia’s coverage.
There is a commercial and regulatory logic to going first. Industry estimates cited in the report put AI’s potential contribution at $45 billion to $115 billion a year to the Australian economy by 2030, and the federal government’s National AI Plan places large institutions under particular scrutiny over automated decision-making and data use.
The bank’s governance answer is a dedicated AI risk forum, toolkits and guardrails, ongoing monitoring and annual reviews. It has also commissioned longitudinal research with Melbourne Business School to track public trust in AI over time. By the end of 2025, more than 27,600 employees had worked through an AI learning series launched in 2024.
The jobs question the report does not settle
Alongside the report, CBA unveiled a $90 million Future Workforce Program spread over three years, or roughly $30 million a year. It includes a Grow Your Career portal that maps every role in the bank, including the chief executive’s, and points staff towards training and internal moves. The bank says it consulted unions during its design.
The program describes a “medium term” shift rather than immediate large-scale change, and stops short of committing to job creation or redeployment numbers. That reticence sits uneasily against the redundancies now in train.
As the Australian Computer Society’s Information Age reported, CBA is cutting 176 technology and engineering roles plus about 100 further positions across operations, business and retail banking, announced around the start of the new financial year. That follows an earlier round of 119 redundancies, and the FSU has filed a dispute covering 276 affected roles.
FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano was blunt. “This is a bank that regularly turns billions of dollars in profit and claims to invest in skilling and developing local workers, yet continues to brutally axe local jobs in favour of offshoring for even greater profits,” she said, per Information Age.
The union alleges CBA advertised similar roles through its Indian subsidiary, whose headcount grew from about 3,000 in 2022 to around 7,000 by mid-2025. A bank spokesperson denied any link, telling Information Age the Indian roles were “separate and unrelated” to the Australian changes, and attributed the restructure to workflow automation and consolidation.
Why it matters
What CBA does with AI sets the tempo for Australian financial services, and increasingly for the labour market attached to it. The bank employs tens of thousands of people, and its choices ripple through call centres, engineering teams and the graduate pipeline that feeds the sector.
The stakes are not abstract. In August 2025, CBA reversed a decision to make 45 call-centre roles redundant after telling staff an AI voice bot had cut call volumes. Union members said volumes were actually rising, and the bank admitted to Information Age it had not adequately considered all business factors, calling the move an error and apologising to those affected.
That episode is the shadow over this report. It showed how quickly an AI efficiency claim can outrun the evidence, and why transparency on paper is not the same as transparency in practice. For a sector where trust is the product, the gap between the two is where sovereignty over decisions, and over jobs, is really contested.
What to watch next
The immediate test is the Fair Work Commission, where the FSU has flagged further action over the current redundancies and is pushing for a clause banning forced redundancies driven by AI in its 2026 enterprise agreement claim.
The longer test is whether CBA’s annual review commitment produces real accountability, or a polished restatement. The bank has promised to revisit its principles each year, and its Melbourne Business School research will offer an external read on public trust.
Rival banks and regulators will be watching. If an Australian-first disclosure becomes an industry norm, the next question is whether the reports describe how the jobs are changing with the same candour they bring to the fraud statistics.
Sources: Commonwealth Bank newsroom, Commonwealth Bank, Future Workforce Program, SecurityBrief Australia, ACS Information Age (job cuts), ACS Information Age (voice bot reversal).
