Few Australian business leaders feel ready to take advantage of artificial intelligence and adoption of the technology has been slow and often reluctant, according to a roundtable of experts. At the same time, criminals and trolls have taken to AI with alacrity – spawning a barrage of fraud and deep fakes. Recent research by digital telecommunications giant Cisco found only 4 per cent of Australian business leaders said they felt they were equipped to take advantage of AI, compared with 15 per cent in the Asia-Pacific.
Cisco president Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China Ben Dawson told the roundtable that one obstacle to AI adoption noted by the business leaders was a lack of digital infrastructure, both internally in companies and more broadly across the nation. “They didn’t feel like they had the strategy or the frameworks,” he said. “They were lacking policy governance.”
By comparison, the US broadly sees AI as a source of global power, influence and innovation, and the nation was investing in AI “almost without limits”, Dawson said. At the same time, the developing economies of Indonesia, Korea, and China regard AI as an opportunity to leapfrog developments quickly, he said, while needing to build their own local language AI models.
Australia had been a rapid adopter of digital technology in the past, but “we’re not seeing the same with this AI revolution and opportunity,” he said. “And I do think, absolutely, we’re seeing countries and companies gaining enormous benefit.”
Anecdotally, Dawson added, Australian companies slow to adopt AI have seen employees take tasks home in order to augment their work with their own AI resources.
Optus Enterprise and Business managing director Gladys Berejiklian said there was wide consensus that AI can significantly boost productivity and augment the work of human employees across a wide range of industries.
“AI can do the boring, repeatable work, and our people can do the great work,” she said, adding the technology would also see a shift to new types of work.
“I think people will have more meaningful work, more variety of work, and all of us as businesses in Australia need to be part of the conversation to think about where those future opportunities are,” she added. “So as a workplace, if you’re not considering the employee experience alongside the customer experience, the talent will go elsewhere.”
AI is front and centre in everything Amazon does, said Russell Hall, Country Lead ANZ Amazon Kuiper Commercial Services. “I think once it’s used in the right way, within certain guardrails that you can put across an organisation, it’s extremely powerful,” he added, noting organisations have to carefully consider the types of policy guidelines necessary to allow employees and customers to use AI-enabled tools effectively. Amazon uses generative AI prolifically at the moment, he added, and it’s “very much embraced”.
Hall added that it was important to ensure that partners “had a shared vision of data security” for information shared outside the organisation. “I think there’s an onus on enterprise, business and government to ensure that the checks and balances are checked right,” he said, “to make sure that data is securely transferred between certain systems.”
Bad actors have been at the forefront of AI adoption, ConnectID managing director Andrew Black told the roundtable. “We’ve seen an increase in fraud using AI tools,” he said, adding the technology had been weaponised and the ability to grab digital images and voices had been used to do harm in low-level interactions with ordinary citizens.
Fraudsters sending messages purporting to be someone’s child in trouble and asking for money is just one low-level type of AI-supported criminal behaviour, he added, suggesting future technology developments should build in a resilient identity layer. “How do we protect people from those actions when AI is becoming even more pervasive,” he said. “It’s a growing threat and a pretty worrying trend.”
Evolving at warp speed, AI is providing business with a range of powerful tools, and just over the horizon, agentic AI is now set to provide yet more opportunities to consumers and businesses.
Black said ConnectID is considering how consumers might use agentic AI to take over the mundane tasks of everyday life – such as the weekly shop, or finding the best telco plan or the best new savings account, or booking trips by scanning Qantas over a set time period and sending an alert when a flight price falls below a certain point.
He emphasised the need for Australian data centres, saying domestic sovereignty was important, not just in AI and data security, but also in payments. “We not only see the security and resilience by having options on-shore, but it also helps in terms of cost and competition,” he said.
Collaboration with international partners was often beneficial, he added, but “I think having our own frontier models here to show you is pretty important”.