H2O.ai Unleashes H2O World in Sydney with Commonwealth Bank of Australia in the Largest Gathering of AI Grandmasters in the World

Event marks the biggest gathering of world’s best data scientists in Australian history as professionals assemble to transform Australia into AI nation

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. & SYDNEY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–H2O.ai, the AI Cloud leader, today announced a series of product enhancements designed to further democratize artificial intelligence by improving the ability of non-technical analysts to use the company’s powerful award-winning technology with both structured and unstructured data, like the award winning Document AI, Hydrogen Torch, and autoML.

The updates were announced at H2O World, the company’s first conference in Australia. The event was held at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s head office in Sydney. Thousands of viewers joined the conference online. The event also marks the largest gathering of Kaggle Grand Masters (KGMs) in Australia. Kaggle is an international arena for data scientists to compete to solve complex data problems– H2O.ai is home to more than 30 KGMs, widely accepted as the best data scientists in the world, gathering in Sydney to elevate and inspire AI transformation across the nation, as Sri Ambati, CEO and founder of H2O.ai noted last year.

The event featured world-class speakers including:

• Matt Comyn, CEO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, participated in a dynamic fireside chat with Ambati.
• Dr. Andrew McMullan, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Commonwealth Bank of Australia
• Dan Jermyn, Chief Decision Scientist, Commonwealth Bank of Australia
• Sonal Surana, General Manager, CommBank.ai
• Edward Santow, Professor at UTS, Co-Director of the Human Technology Institute, Australia’s Former Human Rights Commissioner
• Junko Yamashita, Digital Strategy HQ Global Application and Data Management Center, Yokogawa
• Tanya Berger-Wolf, Director, Co-founder & Director, AI for conservation nonprofit Wild Me
• Additional partners from Dell, Accenture, McKinsey, Snowflake, and SimplyAI

H2O.ai announced the launch of The Driverless AI Wizard, an interactive tool designed to help both citizen data scientists and experienced users maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their AI models. The Wizard serves as a key democratization piece of H2O.ai’s platform by looking at data and recommending next steps a user can take. A key goal of the Wizard is to help users avoid common pitfalls and instead use best practices that experts employ to make the correct choices while modeling to reduce the risk of inaccurate or bad models. The educational component of the Wizard is designed to help people who don’t typically work in the field of machine learning to understand key data science concepts and uncover insights.

The Wizard is designed to help four specific types of roles and users: data scientists, data engineers, business analysts, and domain experts. Safeguards ensure that even non-expert users can develop and deploy AI models safely and securely to help genuinely scale responsible AI across an organization.

In addition, H2O.ai announced updates to its new labeling tool for deep learning use cases called Label Genie, including zero shot learning, support for audio uses, and more. H2O.ai’s no code deep learning engine, H2O Hydrogen Torch, also received new updates to compare experiments, automate grid search, and enhance interpretability for NLP.

These innovations come less than 12 months after the company launched their Document AI product. H2O Document AI helps organizations quickly and accurately process documents and unstructured text data to increase productivity and find hidden insights. H2O Document AI provides automation not previously possible by combining state-of-the-art Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision and layout intelligence. The service has flexible out-of-the-box document pre- and post-processing and seamlessly integrates with customers’ existing business processes and workflows for structured and unstructured data.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia currently has hundreds of employees leveraging artificial intelligence using H2O.ai’s platform across a wide range of use cases throughout the Group. With Document AI, the bank has now expanded its machine-learning capability to incorporate digitized documents, with the capacity to process millions of files using an array of custom-trained models that can be tailored to any format or use case.

The bank explained how Document AI was being used to augment the existing customer on-boarding approach (KYC), a heavily manual process that relies upon large volumes of digitized documentation. Leveraging AI to process such large volumes of unstructured data can transform the process at scale, by reducing human error, improving accuracy, and delivering a better experience for customers.

“In order to serve our customers even better, we must continually seek to modernize systems and ensure we are leveraging global best in-class technology,” said Dr. Andrew McMullan, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “Through our partnership with H2O.ai, we are unlocking the huge potential of AI to deliver better services and experiences for our customers and communities.”

H2O.ai has a strong commitment to democratizing AI to better the world through its AI 4 Good initiative. The company focuses on education, conservation, and healthcare to improve the world. As part of the H2O World agenda, Tanya Berger-Wolf spoke about the conservation nonprofit she co-founded, Wild Me. She noted the use of AI in support of the organization’s mission. The organization is focused on protecting the planet’s biodiversity with inputs from researchers, citizen scientists, automated cameras, and social media across users with varying degrees of expertise in data science, further demonstrating the commitment to democratize AI for everyone.

As the company returns to in-person events, they have also organized an H2O World in Dallas, Texas on November 17 next week at AT&T.

For more information about H2O.ai’s H2O World event, the company’s Wizard tool or its AI 4 Good work, visit https://h2o.ai/.

About H2O.ai

H2O.ai is the leading AI Cloud company, on a mission to democratize AI and drive an open AI movement around the world. They focus on drawing insights from structured and unstructured data like video and documents with their award-winning products like Hydrogen Torch and Document AI. Customers use the H2O AI Cloud to rapidly solve complex business problems and accelerate the discovery of new ideas. H2O.ai is the trusted AI provider to more than 20,000 global organizations, millions of data scientists and over half of the Fortune 500, including AT&T, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Citi, GlaxoSmithKline, Hitachi, Kaiser Permanente, Procter & Gamble, PayPal, PwC, Reckitt, Unilever, Goldman Sachs, NVIDIA, and Wells Fargo are not only customers and partners, but strategic investors in the company. More than 30 Kaggle Grandmasters (the community of best-in-the-world machine learning practitioners and data scientists) are makers at H2O.ai. A strong AI for Good ethos to make the world a better place and Responsible AI drive the company’s purpose. Please join our movement at www.h2o.ai.

Contacts

Media:
Anthony Gomes

press@h2o.ai