An AAAI Fellow from Sydney joins the UNSW Business AI Lab to head a team of Distinguished AI Scientists, marking a new phase in the Commonwealth Bank’s advanced AI initiatives.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia named Professor Mary-Anne Williams as its inaugural Chief AI Scientist on Monday, hiring a prominent AI researcher from the University of New South Wales after an extensive search globally, as explained by the bank.
Williams will head CommBank’s team of Distinguished AI Scientists, specializing in machine learning, responsible AI, AI security, and generative AI.
Williams holds the Michael J Crouch Chair for Innovation at UNSW, founded the UNSW Business AI Lab, and is deputy director of the UNSW AI Institute. She is a Stanford Fellow, a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, included in Robohub’s Top 25 Women in Robotics, and was part of the Sydney-based Social Robotics RoboCup team that won a world championship in 2019.
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Her recent research, over the past 18 months, has concentrated on organizational management and orchestration of generative AI agent fleets at scale, a subject now being expanded within the bank.
Though the Chief AI Scientist role is new at CBA, it builds upon a broader strategy. Ranil Boteju became Chief AI Officer in November 2025 after serving as Lloyds Banking Group’s data chief. CBA introduced a $90m AI-ready workforce program in February.
The bank recently opened a San Francisco Technology Hub, complementing an existing Seattle Tech Hub, to position its engineers near AI labs. Partnerships with Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, and OpenAI have been established directly.
This strategy has shown external impact, with CommBank ranked fourth globally and first in Asia Pacific on the 2025 Evident AI Index, assessing bank AI maturity. Boteju stated that Williams’ unique blend of academic leadership, commercial insight, and technical expertise will expedite AI strategy advancement.
Williams noted CBA’s development of advanced AI capabilities globally, emphasizing her commitment to understanding AI’s societal impacts and promoting responsible AI innovation.
Major US tech and financial firms have followed a similar hiring strategy for the past two years: recruiting AI leaders directly from academia rather than peer banks or labs.
CBA’s announcement highlights this strategy as a template