ANZ rolls out AI agents for business bankers

ANZ has started rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) agents within its new customer relationship management (CRM) system to help business bankers recover hours of lost productivity by automating tasks and streamlining workflows.

By consolidating data from 20 disparate systems into a single interface, ANZ said the CRM system, along with the use of AI agents powered by Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, can help bankers suss out leads, visualise customer insights, and prioritise daily activities.

Bankers will also be able to access real-time customer account summaries – expected to save them the equivalent of about one working month per year – and a new chat interface will make searching for and accessing customer data easier and more insightful.

The use of Agentforce, which ANZ claimed is the first in the Asia-Pacific region to be deployed at scale, follows a national roll-out of the new CRM system across its business bankers and frontline teams.

Clare Morgan, ANZ group executive for business and private bank, noted that the platform will transform how the bank’s business and private bankers manage customer relationships, and deliver better experiences for customers, brokers and bankers.

“Our new platform is a game changer – simplifying systems, saving time and helping bankers focus on what matters most: building strong relationships and helping customers run and grow their businesses. It’s one of several major investments we’re making to uplift our frontline and deliver on our customer-first strategy,” Morgan said. 

“We’re also accelerating our digital roadmap, bringing forward the launch of the ANZ Plus front-end for most small to medium business customers to late 2027,” she said, referring to ANZ’s new digital banking service. “That means a more seamless, connected experience for our customers on a market leading platform.”

ANZ is the latest among Australia’s Big Four banks to double down on AI investments. Earlier this year, Macquarie Bank launched an AI agent to provide instant, personalised assistance to customers via its mobile app and online banking platform.

In 2025, Westpac deepened its partnership with Accenture to deploy AI agents in its engineering division, reporting that its AI-powered software engineer had reduced complex code migration tasks from six days to one hour.

Meanwhile, Commonwealth Bank is leveraging generative AI for customer protection and personalisation, gaining global attention for deploying AI voice and text bots designed to engage with and waste the time of telephone scammers, while also using its massive data lake to personalise customer app interfaces.

For Salesforce, the ANZ deal marks a major win for the Agentforce platform in the Asia-Pacific region. The software-as-a-service giant has been under pressure to show that its AI tools can deliver returns on investment for enterprise customers that are increasingly wary of “AI pilot purgatory”, where AI projects fail to advance to full-scale production.

According to research by Cisco and the Governance Institute of Australia, Australian organisations are lagging behind their regional peers in adopting AI, putting A$142bn worth of economic opportunity at risk.

Key AI adoption challenges faced by Australian firms include a lack of governance readiness, the use of shadow AI tools by employees, a lack of formal training and uncertainty about how to measure returns from AI investments.