NAB has opened Ruby to more than 40,000 colleagues
Personal productivity is the job National Australia Bank has given Ruby. On the media call for the 2026 full-year results, group chief executive Andrew Irvine said the bank has deployed an AI solution branded Ruby to internal colleagues. Over 40,000 colleagues will have access. It is built on an Anthropic platform. It will be broadly available to those colleagues for personal productivity.
The investor pack describes Ruby.AI as the colleague layer: access to role-appropriate tools, with the examples Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code and Devin, plus purpose-built tools, and NAB-wide training in the responsible use of AI. Irvine separated that access from about 50 business squads. He called those squads the use cases where the bank sees significant value for customers, colleagues or shareholders, lined up with growing business banking, deposits and proprietary home lending. His example was helping business bankers write credit memos, and speeding that up very significantly, while the bankers stay highly accountable for the application. The pack reports a 20 per cent average reduction in the time taken to prepare business lending credit memorandums, for the user groups in scope, measured against how that work was done before. It is not a result for the whole bank.
His line on jobs was not a replacement claim. For the near term, he said, the primary use is augmentation: adding to what colleagues can do, rather than automating the work. As a regulated bank, he said, NAB has to get it 100 per cent right, so humans stay fully accountable before he is comfortable with more automation. He added that the automation use cases are the ones he would expect to have a bigger impact on the workforce.
That sits beside a decision the bank had already taken. On 20 October NAB said it expects to reduce its internal workforce by up to 2,500 roles, about 6 per cent, in the 2027 financial year, including up to 1,500 roles before the end of 2026. The focus is corporate functions. Irvine said there will be no material impact on customer-facing banking roles, and that senior management roles are being cut more deeply so responsibilities are broader. Consultation with colleagues and the Finance Sector Union has started. Support for people who leave includes redeployment and reskilling. On the results call he said the decisions are difficult, that they affect colleagues, and that the bank is treating them with care, dignity and respect. On NAB's own account, Ruby does not explain that reduction. A tool for 40,000 colleagues and a smaller corporate centre are two different moves. The test is whether the responsible-use training, and the squads, change the work a person still owns. That is how our AI Training programs are built.
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