When Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) needed help developing artificial intelligence technology to improve its banking operations, ranging from cyber-threat detection to cash optimization, it auditioned A.I. startup H20.ai and its open-source machine learning platform. After starting as an experimental pilot partnership, the bank, Australia’s largest, empowered the startup to customize and scale its tech across the bank’s business. But H20.ai didn’t only create tech solutions tailored for the bank, it provided holistic support, scaling talent—training more than 1,000 bank workers—and driving change management with a team of experts dedicated to the bank.

Incumbents like CBA are increasingly looking to A.I. technology to solve their business problems and are eyeing external tech partners to source those A.I. solutions. But these traditional companies have faced challenges nurturing meaningful collaborations that maximize the support they get from A.I. players. Only 1 in 5 incumbents found the right kind of A.I. player, like H20.ai is for CBA, that offers access to custom technology, as well as support for talent, training, and change management, prompting the incumbent to overhaul its processes. We call these A.I. players that provide such support transformers.