The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA) share price opened in the green this morning amid news the bank is working with a leading Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence (AI) company.
CBA has partnered with, and bought a minority holding in, H2O.ai. Under their agreement, the operator of cloud-based machine learning platform H2O AI Cloud will provide CBA with its product and work to create new solutions for the bank.
The CBA share price popped at market open on Monday, rising to $109.98, before dipping into the red. At the time of writing, CBA shares are creeping back up to $110.06, 0.32% higher than the previous close.
For context, the broader market followed a similar pattern this morning, popping on open before dipping into the red. Right now, the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) is up 0.08% while the All Ordinaries Index (ASX: XAO) is up 0.6%.
Let's take a closer look at today's news from CBA.
CBA banking on AI-led future
The CBA share price is up after the bank announced its latest push to increase trust, confidence and engagement in its business.
The bank plans to use AI to help its customers save money while shopping across, and drive sales to, platforms including Little Birdie, Karta, CommBank Rewards, and Klarna.
The technology will also help the bank's retail and business customers predict bills and forecast cash flows. It could potentially predict energy use and, thus, help lower carbon emissions.
H2O.ai provides AI services to more than 20,000 organisations, including more than half of the Fortune 500. It also employs the top 20 Kaggle grandmasters – a title given to best-in-the-world data scientists and machine learning practitioners.
CBA is now the AI company's exclusive financial services partner in Australia and New Zealand.
The bank's CEO, Matt Comyn, commented on the partnership:
This partnership will accelerate our ability to deliver a broader customer proposition through more personalised experiences, which delivers greater value for our customers… the more our customers engage with us, the better we are able to anticipate their needs.
H2O.ai's founder and CEO, Sri Ambati, said the partnership "will be fun":
[It] 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.
CBA's partnership with H2O.ai is the latest step the bank has taken to embrace data and technology within its business. Earlier this year, CBA entered a joint venture with data science firm Quantium. Under the joint venture, the two entities will provide data to governments, businesses, and investors.
CBA share price snapshot
It's been a great month so far for the CBA share price. Since the end of October, the bank's stock value has increased around 5%.
CBA shares have gained 33% since the start of 2021 and 57% since this time last year.
