Insights
Beyond chatbots: Prioritising the AI opportunities that matter most for super funds
- Date 21 Oct 2026
- Filed under Insights
Part one in a series exploring the practical application of AI in superannuation
It’s now clear that Artificial Intelligence is not just an experimental technology.
This is especially true for the Australian superannuation industry, where it’s quickly become a boardroom priority.
However, while most funds recognise AI’s potential, many are still grappling with how (and where) it can deliver meaningful business outcomes quickly and at scale.
Notably, a great deal of market attention continues to focus on chatbots and self-service channels, but these represent only a fraction of available opportunities. In my experience working across superannuation, some of the biggest gains come from automating and augmenting the operational workflows that sit behind member and employer interactions.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the most successful AI strategies are not technology-led. They are workflow-led.
An industry facing growing operational pressure
Super funds are balancing a complex set of priorities: improving member experience, managing regulatory obligations, reducing administration costs and supporting growing member bases without a corresponding increase in operational headcount.
At the same time, service operations remain under pressure. A study commissioned by Super Consumers Australia found that some funds struggled to answer calls within 15 minutes, highlighting the challenges many organisations continue to face in maintaining service levels and member satisfaction.
Adding to this challenge is the specialist nature of superannuation and pensions.
Contact centre consultants are expected to understand contributions, insurance, taxation, retirement products, preservation rules, beneficiaries, claims processes and evolving regulation. Recruiting, training and retaining skilled consultants also remain expensive and time-consuming, while onboarding new staff can take months before they can confidently manage complex enquiries.
It is against this backdrop that AI has the potential to become a powerful workforce multiplier.
Looking beyond the chatbot
When organisations begin exploring AI opportunities, they often start with customer-facing use cases. However, the biggest opportunities often sit behind the contact centre.
Based on our experience across financial services and superannuation, some of the most compelling candidates for AI-enabled automation include:
- Employer contribution file validation and exception management
- SuperStream error handling
- Contribution allocation issues
- Claims administration and status management
- Tax statement requests
- Rollovers and benefit payment tracking
- Insurance enquiries
- Member correspondence and account maintenance
These processes share common characteristics: they are often high-volume, repetitive, rules-based and generate significant manual effort when exceptions occur.
Employer contribution processing is a prime example. Files regularly arrive with missing information, incorrect member details, contribution mismatches or validation failures. The resulting remediation effort spans operations teams, employer servicing teams and contact centres, often generating avoidable inbound enquiries.
AI can mitigate this by automatically identifying errors, categorising exceptions, recommending remediation actions, generating communications and routing work to the right teams. Rather than responding to problems after they occur, funds can resolve them before members or employers need to make contact.
The outcome is lower operational cost, fewer inbound calls, faster turnaround times and a better overall experience.
Empowering frontline teams with AI
The value of AI also goes well beyond workflow automation.
Within contact centres, AI can help consultants find answers faster, navigate complex procedures, access relevant knowledge and provide more consistent responses.
This can help super funds:
- Reduce average handling times
- Improve first-contact resolution
- Accelerate consultant onboarding and training
- Improve response consistency
- Reduce dependency on subject matter experts
- Improve member and employer experiences
Importantly, this is not about replacing people. It’s about freeing them up, allowing them to spend more time on high-value conversations and less time searching for information, processing exceptions or completing repetitive administrative tasks.
For an industry facing increasing service demand and ongoing workforce challenges, improvements in employee productivity can be just as valuable as reducing inbound call volumes.
From concept to industry-first implementation
The conversation about AI in superannuation is increasingly shifting from “what’s possible?” to “where can AI deliver practical value today?”
One example from our side at NRI is a recent partnership with Brighter Super. Here, we were brought in to deliver the first deployment of Salesforce Agentforce within the Australian superannuation industry.
The AI-powered solution, known as Sparkie, helps contact centre consultants quickly access relevant information from complex insurance documentation, knowledge articles and operational sources, improving the speed, relevance and consistency of responses provided to members.
For super funds, this capability is particularly valuable because consultants are often required to navigate hundreds of policy documents, product rules, legislative requirements and procedural guides while supporting members in real time.
As part of the implementation, NRI also configured Agentforce’s reasoning capabilities to meet Brighter Super’s specific knowledge retrieval requirements.
During testing, the solution achieved close to 100% retrieval accuracy across hundreds of test scenarios, helping consultants access information with greater confidence while reducing the time spent searching across multiple systems and knowledge repositories.
According to James Gyton, Chief Operating Officer of Brighter Super:
“In superannuation, where member needs can be complex and the information behind every conversation matters, AI has to solve a real problem. For us, that means helping our people navigate complexity with greater confidence and better support our members. Sparkie puts that principle into practice, strengthening the support available behind the scenes while keeping the member relationship firmly human.”
This implementation highlights one of the biggest opportunities for super funds. AI is not simply about automating member interactions. It is about improving employee productivity and effectiveness.
It can also significantly increase the capacity of service teams without compromising member experience by:
- Helping consultants find accurate information faster
- Reducing knowledge-search effort
- Shortening onboarding cycles
- Improving response consistency
The Brighter Super implementation demonstrates how AI can deliver these practical outcomes within highly regulated superannuation environments, while supporting rather than replacing frontline teams.
Why NRI
While implementations like Brighter Super’s demonstrate what’s achievable, many funds still struggle to accurately identify where AI should be applied and how to translate opportunities into practical outcomes.
At NRI, we help super funds bridge that gap, drawing on our expertise across superannuation, data and AI, customer experience and business transformation to identify, prioritise and deliver solutions that address real operational challenges.
Our role is not to tell super funds how their business operates. Most already understand their processes exceedingly well.
Our role is to help identify where AI can create the fastest and most meaningful value.
Data & AI
NRI’s Data & AI practice helps organisations establish the foundations required for successful AI adoption, including data strategy, governance, analytics, machine learning, generative AI and agentic AI solutions.
This ensures AI initiatives are built on trusted data and aligned to measurable business outcomes.
AI Workflow Lab
Our AI Workflow Lab helps organisations rapidly identify, assess and prioritise AI opportunities across the enterprise.
By examining operational workloads, exception volumes, servicing demands and process bottlenecks, we help clients focus on the workflows that will deliver the greatest return on investment.
Journey Mapping
Through Pragma, NRI brings leading service design and customer experience capabilities.
Using journey mapping and human-centred design approaches, we help super funds understand the experiences of members, employers and service teams, identifying pain points and opportunities for automation across the end-to-end service lifecycle.
Agentforce Leader
As the delivery partner behind the first implementation of Salesforce Agentforce in the Australian superannuation industry , NRI has practical experience helping organisations move from AI experimentation to production-grade deployment.
Having worked through the challenges of retrieval accuracy, reasoning, governance and user adoption within a highly regulated environment, we understand what it takes to turn AI from a promising concept into a business capability.
The real opportunity
The funds that achieve the greatest value from AI will not necessarily be those that deploy the latest technology. They will be those that prioritise the right opportunities first.
In our experience, the most impactful opportunities often sit behind the contact centre: employer contribution processing, exception management, claims administration, correspondence handling, information retrieval and member servicing workflows. These are the processes that consume significant operational effort, create member frustration when delays occur and generate substantial servicing demand.
By targeting these areas, super funds can improve service levels, reduce operational cost, increase staff productivity and create capacity for their people to focus on the interactions that matter most.
Because the future of AI in superannuation is not just about building better chatbots.
It’s about identifying the workflows that matter most and applying AI where it can deliver measurable value for members, employers and the business. In an industry where service quality, operational efficiency and member outcomes are increasingly intertwined, that opportunity has never been more important.
Next up in the series
What Japan’s experience can teach Australian super funds about putting AI into practice: From knowledge to action — AI workflow lessons from Japan for super funds
References
- Super Consumers Australia (2026) – Super fund call centres put to the test
