(10 November 2026 – Australia) NAB has equipped staff with an Anthropic based AI tool called Ruby to enhance personal productivity.
The bank has organised staff into internal “squads” to advance an additional 50 use cases for AI technology. The agile-styled squads were all created over the past year and represent a group of staff that operates like a startup within a large organisation.
NAB highlighted a 20 percent reduction in the time needed to approve business loans and faster access to insights that enabled bankers to personalise services for customers as part of agentic AI development.
“We have now deployed an AI solution that we’ve branded Ruby to our internal colleagues. Over 40,000 of our colleagues will have access to Ruby, and that’s built on an Anthropic platform that we’re very excited about. It will be broadly available to those colleagues for personal productivity” stated NAB Group CEO and Managing Director Andrew Irvine.
“AI technology is developing rapidly and will be increasingly important to how we serve customers and to how we run our bank. Over the last 12 months, NAB has set up our key AI squads and established clear frameworks and foundations to govern and manage AI activities including a single AI platform. We’ve also established around 50 business-led squads of cross-divisional teams working alongside global strategic partners such as Anthropic and AWS.”
Separately, NAB is completing payments of A$127 million, plus A$34 million in interest and A$8 million in superannuation, to 65,999 underpaid workers as part of entering into an Enforceable Undertaking (EU) with the Fair Work Ombudsman. The bank will also make a A$2 million contrition payment to the Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue Fund and has committed to a range of measures aimed at ensuring it complies with workplace laws in future.