(12 September 2025 – Australia) Macquarie is trialling Future Secure’s artificial intelligence (AI) digital worker technology for HR and finance back office roles.
The move is part of the group’s investment in Future Secure, an AI start-up that enables teams of Agentic AI employees characterised individually by their own “human avatar” with a specific name and face. The company states that its mission is to support humans and AI agents to work more closely together, giving everyone the ability to perform ten times better, the AFR reports.
The teams are managed by a real supervisor, denoted as the “human in the loop”. Agentic workers are a more sophisticated form of AI than Generative AI intelligence such as ChatGPT or Gemini that respond to direct prompts and generate content such as text and images.
Macquarie and CommBank have been the most active Australian banks undertaking AI investments for innovative operational capability. Integrating AI capability is not without challenges as CBA was forced to hire back 45 workers it made redundant a month later after the workload in the call centres increased and Meta aggressively restructured its AI division.
“While we are early in the journey, we are supporting our people as they explore and adapt to new technologies, including through initiatives such as Future Secure AI’s digital co-workers to work as part of our teams. This particularly addresses repetitive, high-volume and uniform processes, so teams can better manage workloads, deliver outcomes more quickly at reduced cost and with reduced risk of manual error, and focus on more strategic initiatives” commented a Macquarie spokesperson.
James Eyers reports that other major lenders are building AI-powered “agents” (software that can do the same work as humans) in their business banking divisions as the battle for AI supremacy in financial services intensifies despite workforce concerns about the risk to jobs and a sluggish uptake of AI among SMEs.