CBA will gain a dedicated team of experts from H2O.ai to develop new AI solutions that will enable it to offer personalised products to its customers. Credit: Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has purchased a minority stake in Silicon Valley-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI) firm H2O.ai as part of an exclusive partnership.

Financial terms of the deal and the size of the stake have not been disclosed.

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H2O.ai runs a cloud-based machine learning platform called H2O AI Cloud.

The partnership will see CBA deploying the H2O AI Cloud platform across its entire operations, offering it to data scientists, data engineers and business users.

Additionally, the bank will gain a dedicated team of experts from H2O.ai to develop new AI solutions that will enable it to offer personalised products to its customers.

CBA CEO Matt Comyn said: “We see broad application for AI and machine learning technology right across our business – in operational processes, protecting customers from fraud, lending decisions, and risk management. It builds on the foundational data and analytics capabilities that Commonwealth Bank has developed over the past decade.”

According to Comyn, the bank’s partnership with H2O.ai would further bolster its AI capability to better anticipate customer requirements.

“This partnership will accelerate our ability to deliver a broader customer proposition through more personalised experiences, which delivers greater value for our customers,” he added.

CBA chief data and analytics officer Andrew McMullan noted that H2O.ai will also help the bank to better predict bills and forecast cash flows for both its retail and business customers.

As part of the tie-up, Commonwealth Bank will act as an exclusive financial services partner to H2O.ai in Australia and New Zealand.

H2O.ai Ffounder and CEO Sri Ambati said: “This strategic partnership between the leading global AI Cloud movement and Australia’s largest bank will unleash the juggernaut of co-innovation in AI for Payments and further democratise AI with trust and freedom.

“Our vision is not only to make CBA an AI superpower but make Australia an AI nation as we move to life after Covid. This will be fun.”

Recently, CBA acquired a 20% stake in gift card startup Karta to strengthen its shopping offering. This followed the bank’s investment in online shopping start-up Little Birdie in May this year.