More Australian businesses are harnessing custom AI tools | The Courier
What practical applications do these AI tools and software solutions really offer? Picture Shutterstock
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a bit of a buzzword over the past few years, to say the very least. But as generative AI tools and other smart AI software solutions like business automation tools continue to develop, adoption and integration rates for these tools is unsurprisingly growing in turn.
Today, consumers can all but expect to see AI features being included across tech retail offerings and even in our cars. But what practical applications do these features really offer, and how is Australia’s business landscape faring when it comes to the global race for AI innovation?
Let’s assess Australia’s AI integration trends using insights from the National AI Centre’s (NAIC) AI Adoption Tracker below.
Current AI adoption trends – Public vs. private sector
Australian industries are juggling a few innovation pathways today, including calls for commercial climate-readiness and sustainable business models, as well as future-ready development strategies that include integrating emerging technologies like AI, business automation, and centralised data management platforms.
These initiatives are generally targeted towards evolving core industries like healthcare, agriculture, mining and energy, and manufacturing, ensuring that these sectors can continue to perform sustainably and with robust job growth that includes highly skilled technical roles.
Alongside digital transformation initiatives across these core sectors, Australian businesses across the private sector and service industries like marketing, advertising, and financial services, are also investing in AI tools. Here, AI trends are predominantly driven by two classes of AI technologies: creative generative AI and business automation tools.
Creative generative AI
For Australian businesses managing creative outputs (i.e. ads, marketing campaigns, social media, industry papers and reports, etc.), generative AI tools are poised to transform business outputs, scaling creative departments for higher capacity production.
Here, ethical generative AI tools like Adobe Firefly have become worth their weight in gold. The key differentiator in assessing ethical creative AI tools is naturally copyright safety. With Adobe’s Content Credentials metadata for Firefly outputs, businesses can better track and monitor their AI generated outputs, ensuring a consistent level of quality across generated assets.
AI transparency is naturally also a major concern for Australian AI policymakers, both within and surrounding the NAIC.
This is why the Department of Industry, Science & Resources has recognised the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) of which Adobe is also a member, as a vital global initiative in the fight for ethical AI content. For Australian businesses looking to follow suit and invest in ethical AI adoption, utilising commercially-safe tools like Firefly’s AI image generator can help ensure their enterprise establishes strong foundational processes for generative AI applications and integrations.
Business automation tools
Speaking of processes, the other side of the coin for creative AI outputs is system-oriented AI applications. The NAIC found that the top 5 business outcomes (based on a survey of 400+ SMEs) for AI integration in Australia is currently driven by a focus on:
- Faster access to accurate data to inform decision making
- Enhanced engagement and response to marketing activities
- Enhanced resource optimisation and productivity
- Improved customer experience and engagement
- Stronger security, data protection and fraud detection
These business outcomes speak to a recognition across Australian SMEs of the value of AI for boosting operational efficiency and providing enterprises with more autonomy over their own resource management.
As a result, we’re seeing more Australian businesses investing in proprietary AI tools, both in the form of fully customisable automation tools that are designed to integrate within existing processes, and centralised AI-powered data management platforms that provide enterprises with a whole systems overview of all their data.
Both business automation tools and AI-powered centralised data management systems are driving tech evolutions across Australia’s private sector, empowering SMEs to take full control over their own environmental, financial, and general performance management by generating data insights at a granular level and automating data analytics processes to streamline organisational capabilities for identifying dynamic data correlations.
Key insights from the NAIC AI Adoption Tracker
In partnership with data research firm the Fifth Quadrant, the NAIC AI Adoption Tracker provides monthly insights (including monthly data trends) across the following key areas of Australia’s AI adoption landscape:
General AI adoption data
Under this interactive dashboard, the NAIC AI Adoption Tracker shows shifts over time in the number of SMEs in Australia recorded as using AI tools and systems. The dashboard’s recorded data range starts from May 2024 and works on a scale from ‘unaware’ or ‘not aware’ of AI tools to ‘broad use’ of AI tools.
The full range is as follows:
- Not aware
- Do not intend to implement
- Intend to implement
- In the process of implementing
- Limited use
- Broad use
Over the past two years, the general AI adoption data gathered by NAIC has demonstrated a growing shift from ‘not aware’ to ‘in the process of implementing’ and towards the higher end of the spectrum signifying that AI tools are currently being used to varying scopes and degrees.
AI application data
Under this dashboard, NAIC tracks awareness and utilisation of different types of AI applications, including:
- Generative AI Assistants
- Customer Support and Chatbots
- Data Entry and Document Processing
- Employee Recruitment and HR Analytics
- Fraud Detection
- Marketing Automation
- New Product Development
- Predictive Analytics
- Sales Forecasting
- Supply Chain Optimisation
Across these categories of AI applications, ‘Data Entry and Document Processing’, ‘Fraud Detection’, and ‘Generative AI Assistants’ are amongst the most popular AI applications used by Australian SMEs today. This rings true with the growing adoption of creative generative AI tools and custom business automation and data management tools outlined across NAIC’s AI adoption trends takeaway outlined above.
AI business outcome data
Under this dashboard, the NAIC AI tracker is assessing how businesses are using AI to achieve the following business outcomes:
- enhanced engagement and response to marketing activities
- enhanced resource optimisation and productivity
- faster access to accurate data to inform decision making
- improved customer experience/engagement
- improved employee experience/engagement
- increased revenue/profit/cashflow
- improved quality control
- stronger security, data protection and fraud detection
- more agile product and service innovation
- more effective supply chain and supplier management.
These outcomes also speak to the recognised value of AI for both creative applications as well as business automation and data/resource management systems.
AI benefits and challenges data
Assessing barriers to AI adoption and misconceptions surrounding AI is a vital component of accurately tracking Australia’s AI adoption. This is why NAIC developed the AI benefits and challenges data dashboard. Unlike the other data insights that mirror real-world shifts in AI integration, the ‘benefits and challenges’ dashboard instead measures sentiments from SMEs surrounding the implementation, application, and management of AI tools.
The dashboard evaluates sentiments from Australian SMEs across the following subjective points:
- AI is moving too fast so it’s difficult to know when to invest.
- AI offers compelling use cases that can transform our business.
- AI solutions will provide my business with a competitive edge.
- It’s hard to integrate AI with our existing IT systems.
- Our staff are enthusiastic and supportive of using AI in our operations.
- We are confident in managing the regulatory, compliance, and governance issues related to AI.
- We are proactive and stay informed about the opportunities and challenges with AI.
- We are well-prepared to handle any cyber security and privacy issues that might arise with AI.
- We don’t have the expertise or skills in the business to implement AI.
- We don’t have the funding to invest in AI.
- We trust AI to make decisions without significant ethical or bias issues.
Responsible AI data
We’re coming full circle now with the final piece of the puzzle for sustainable AI adoption: responsible AI development and data management. In Australia, NAIC is working collaboratively with the ACSC (Australian Cyber Security Centre) and other agencies to ensure AI policymakers have the right legislative infrastructure in place for ethical data management as well, recognising that Australia’s data literacy is directly tied to our capacity for sustainable AI integration.
As a result, this dashboard in the NAIC AI Adoption Tracker seeks to assess the quality of responsible AI practices being implemented across SMEs that have reported a ‘limited use’ to ‘broad use’ rating for AI adoption across their survey work.
The responsible AI policy statements being tracked by NAIC are as follows:
- Telling customers how the enterprise uses AI
- Following established guidelines for safe and responsible use of AI
- Checking AI results/outputs before they affect customers
- Enabling customers to raise concerns about AI-related decisions
- Having guidelines on what AI can be used for
- Protecting customer data used in AI systems
- Providing staff training on using AI systems appropriately
- Regularly reviewing the accuracy of AI outputs
- Regularly testing AI systems to ensure they’re working as intended
- Training staff to use systems and understand how to check the results
- None of the above
How are Australian businesses utilising custom AI tools?
For Australian SMEs, the NAIC AI Adoption Tracker reveals that we’ve still got a ways to go when it comes to sustainable AI integration. But the growing demand for digital-readiness across Australia’s major industries (i.e. healthcare, agriculture, energy, and manufacturing), require a rapid repositioning to ensure not only operational efficiency, but also improved environmental performance monitoring for a climate-ready future, and responsible data management for an increasingly digitising future to boot.
The good news is that proprietary AI solutions are more accessible than ever, with third-party software developers offering Australian SMEs with opportunities to adopt industry-specific AI tools that are trained on their organisation’s own internally derived data. With these proprietary software models, Australian enterprises are taking charge of their data analytics, automation processes, and general information management.
The same goes for proprietary creative generative AI tools as well. With services like Adobe Firefly Foundry for custom gen AI development, Australian SMEs are investing in their own tailored AI infrastructure across both creative and operational applications.
Australia’s pathway to sustainable AI: what can we expect?
Ultimately, Australia’s pathway to sustainable AI adoption continues to be multi-faceted and highly tailored across environments and industries – but one thing is certain: ethical practices are the foundation for robust, integrated AI systems.
Using NAIC’s frameworks for responsible AI data as well as Australia’s evolving National AI Plan that continues to draw on NAIC’s own research and findings, the Federal Government is continuing to invest in AI legislation and initiative development to further empower Aussie business owners.
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