How Australian organisations' AI adoption is faring

AI adoption in Australia is still low with a recent Deloitte study showing 59 percent of executives have a lack of commitment towards AI.

While this number is high, there are still many opportunities for Australia to be a leader within the AI space.

Dr Kellie Nuttall, AI lead and partner at Deloitte Australia told Digital Nation while Australia is behind on AI adoption, executives are still in the pre-planning stage.

She said she sees a lot of executives talking about how important it will be to their future and they expect they're going to be using it.

“But when you actually look at the number of organisations that have deployed AI, there's actually only about 25 percent of organisations that have confidently confirmed that they've done that,” she said.

Nuttall points out several reasons why executives are struggling to adopt AI in Australia, surprisingly, she said they aren’t technology-related.

“A lot of the time it's, do they have the fluency and the leadership buy-in? Do they understand what these technologies are? Then do they know where to point them?’ Rather than it being technology-led, what are the business problems you're actually seeking to solve with these technologies?” she explained.

“If you don't understand what the technologies can do, it becomes very hard to understand how to use them to solve problems.

“Then it's how do you get technology and non-technology teams to work. AI is very much about solving business problems, but business leaders have to work with technologists to do that, until generative AI.”

She said executives need to ensure they pick the right AI-based use cases that will deliver value for an organisation.

“Once you've picked the right uses, how do you transform your business around that? If you put something in that fundamentally improves your ability to act or make better decisions, if you don't change any of your processes around that. You have put a good tool in there, but you're not getting the value out of it,” she said.

Where to begin

For those executives who are eager to begin their AI journey, Nuttall recommends they should start experimenting in a structured way.

“Traditionally, it was all about working out what your high-value use cases and applications are, then setting up a program to do that in a structured way,” she explained.

“What we're seeing is it's moving so fast that sometimes by the time you do things four weeks later, it's obsolete because it's been embedded into another product or something like that.”

Nuttall said leaders should set up a dedicated innovation team that can prototype, experiment, test and learn.

“See where the value is before you deploy it and scale it. It's about getting those ideas in but then having some prioritisation framework around it and being willing to learn to fail as well, some things are just not going to be great,” she added.