Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) CEO Matt Comyn has cautioned that the expense of deploying artificial intelligence will escalate in less predictable ways as companies integrate the technology for intricate operations. Speaking on Tuesday, Comyn identified this financial outlay as a crucial emerging management challenge. He indicated that businesses worldwide are expected to intensify scrutiny of AI-related spending through 2026, as adoption accelerates and pressure mounts to demonstrate clear returns on investment. This sentiment underscores a growing constraint on AI rollouts across corporate Australia, alongside issues like managing workforce disruption and the substantial energy and water demands of the data centres powering the computing surge.
Unlike most consumers who access free or fixed-cost AI services, corporate users typically pay based on the volume of text processed, commonly referred to as tokens. Comyn explained that while early corporate AI deployments involved relatively simple tasks, keeping token costs modest, this dynamic changes with advanced models. As AI models evolve to include more “reasoning, access to tools, [and] the amount of context that you can put into it,” token costs do not scale on a linear basis, leading to greater financial unpredictability. Commonwealth Bank of Australia is the nation’s largest bank. It also writes a quarter of the country’s mortgages.
CBA itself has been a proactive adopter of AI, recently hosting its own AI summit featuring OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and appointing what it termed the country’s first chief AI scientist at a bank. Despite the looming cost increases, Comyn suggested a potential silver lining. He remarked that rising AI expenditure might help to curb the proliferation of low-value output, which he referred to as “work slop.” Comyn noted that “the scarcity is not around analysis or the preparation of information or PowerPoints or Word docs,” implying that higher costs could encourage more judicious use of AI to generate truly valuable content.
