ANZ Banking Group has switched on Salesforce's Agentforce AI platform in its business banking CRM, becoming the first bank in APAC to run the agentic AI system at scale. The deployment consolidates data from 20 platforms into a single dashboard and automates tasks like real-time account summaries.
The bank claims the system will save bankers approximately one working month per year through automation. Agentforce handles multi-step workflows beyond basic information retrieval, including lead management and customer insights via Salesforce's Data Cloud integration.
"By supercharging the CRM to handle more complex, multi-step tasks, bankers can better manage data-enabled opportunity leads, visualise customer insights, and effectively prioritise daily activities," ANZ said. A new chat interface will make searching customer data "easier and more insightful."
The move ties into ANZ's 2030 Strategy, which includes plans to increase business bankers by nearly 50%. Business and private bank group executive Clare Morgan positioned the CRM investment as part of several "major investments we're making to uplift our frontline and deliver on our customer-first strategy."
Notably, ANZ is accelerating its ANZ Plus digital frontend rollout to late 2027, bringing most small to medium business customers onto the digital-first platform earlier than previously planned. ANZ Plus has been in development since around 2019, and getting more customers onto the stack is a priority for CEO Nuno Matos.
The implementation follows ANZ's national CRM rollout and represents a test case for Agentforce in enterprise banking. Worth noting: Agentforce deployments require data cleansing, governance frameworks like Salesforce's Einstein Trust Layer, and rigorous testing for latency issues when querying external data sources.
The real question is whether the claimed time savings materialise in practice. Agentic AI platforms promise autonomous task handling, but enterprise architects note that poor data quality or skipped governance steps can stall pilots and create compliance risks. ANZ says agentic actions will be "continually enhanced" with user feedback, suggesting an iterative approach.
What this means in practice: If ANZ's deployment delivers on the productivity claims, expect other APAC banks to accelerate their own Agentforce evaluations. If it doesn't, the CRM integration roadmap just got more complicated.