The bank has also announced a partnership with the AI company to gain access to its cloud-based machine learning platform
Commonwealth Bank's global headquarters in Darling Harbour and Darling Quarter, Sydney. (Credit: Stilgherrian/Wikipedia)
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has acquired a minority stake in Silicon Valley-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI) cloud company H2O.ai.
CBA has led a $100m Series E financing round of H2O.ai, with participation from Goldman Sachs, Pivot Investment Partners, Crane Venture Partners, Celesta Capital, and others.
The funding round valued the company at $1.6bn.
The bank has also formed an exclusive partnership with the AI company to gain access to its cloud-based machine learning platform H2O AI Cloud.
As part of the partnership, CBA will offer H2O.ai’s advanced AI Cloud to its entire organisation, including data scientists, data engineers and business users.
In addition, the partnership will enable the bank to gain an expert team of H2O.ai to develop new AI solutions within the bank.
CBA’s chief data and analytics officer Andrew McMullan said: “We are building an AI-powered organisation for the benefit of our customers.
“Through this partnership, we will be able to better help customers find personalised and relevant offers to save money while they shop across platforms like Little Birdie, Karta, CommBank Rewards, and Klarna, while at the same time driving sales for merchants.
“We intend to be one of the highest quality, lowest cost sources of leads to our business customers.”
The partnership with H2O.ai is expected to allow CBA to boost its AI capabilities to produce enhanced customer and community outcomes, at an increased pace and scale.
Commonwealth Bank is also now a financial services partner to H2O.ai in Australia and New Zealand.
H2O.ai founder and CEO Sri Ambati said: “CommBank and H2O.ai are led by our core belief that we can make the world better while serving our communities and customers with excellence.
“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.”