Westpac Hires a Chief AI Innovation Officer
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Details
- Date Published
- 16 Apr 2026
- Priority Score
- 2
- Australian
- Yes
- Created
- 16 Apr 2026, 10:00 pm
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Description
Brings in CBA engineer for newly-created role.
Summary
Westpac has appointed former CBA and Meta engineer Maggie Shi to the newly created role of Chief AI Innovation Officer to oversee the incubation and scaling of generative and agentic AI systems. This move signals a significant push by one of Australia's major financial institutions to integrate advanced AI capabilities across its enterprise operations. While primarily a business transformation initiative, the focus on agentic AI indicates a shift toward autonomous systems that require robust governance and safety frameworks to mitigate operational and systemic risks. The appointment highlights the growing importance of high-level AI leadership in the Australian corporate sector to manage the transition to frontier AI technologies.
Body
Westpac has appointed a chief AI innovation officer, with former CBA and Meta engineer Maggie Shi hired for the new role.
Shi revealed the appointment in a LinkedIn post that Digital Nation verified with the bank.
It’s understood that the chief AI innovation officer remit covers the incubation and scaling of solutions built on new and emerging AI technologies.
This includes experimentation and prototyping across generative AI and agentic AI systems with an aim of driving practical improvements across the Westpac business.
The role reports to chief data, digital and AI officer Andrew McMullan, who also came to Westpac from CBA.
Shi was most recently a distinguished engineer for CBA for almost four years, where - according to her LinkedIn profile - she led “an engineering team at the core of the bank’s data and AI platform, focused on MLOps, LLM Ops, generative AI and agentic AI agent[s].”
In a LinkedIn post announcing her move to Westpac, Shi referred to her career journey to this point, and also confirmed that the chief AI innovation officer role at the bank is newly-created.
“It is a newly created role focused on helping drive AI and GenAI adoption at enterprise scale, bringing together AI, engineering, data, and automation to create meaningful and lasting impact,” she wrote.