A new report from HubSpot, the customer platform for scaling businesses, has found that despite high expectations of artificial intelligence (AI), only 17 per cent of Australian businesses have officially implemented AI or AI-enhanced tools to support employees with their work.
The research found that while organisation-wide adoption is low in Australia, individual use of AI is high, with over half (51 per cent) of business leaders reporting that they personally use AI to support them with their work. Not having proper guidelines and policies for safe use (37 per cent) and concerns relating to data privacy & compliance (36 per cent) and data quality (36 per cent) were among the top reasons businesses haven’t started using AI yet.
This has led to a lack of clarity and transparency in the contribution of AI in organisational outputs, with 59 per cent of businesses lacking visibility into how much of their output is AI versus human-generated.
“Generative AI is a disruptive shift that has the potential to transform how businesses market, sell to and service their customers. However, in Australia, adoption is falling short of expectations. To bridge the gap between personal and business usage, organisations must connect AI to the data and tools that workers actually use, while setting clear policies for responsible usage. Beyond that, investing in training and implementing proper measurement frameworks will be crucial for organisations to accurately track AI ‘s business impact,” said Dan Bognar, VP & MD, JAPAC at HubSpot.
Businesses with policies, processes and systems to track AI usage are seeing the real ROI
To shift from independent to company-wide use, clear guidelines on how to safely use AI must be developed and tools should be embedded into the platforms already being used by businesses. Those that can successfully implement these tools will see the greatest benefit.
Leaders that track and measure the impact of AI are significantly more likely to report business and workforce benefits than those that don’t. These include increased productivity (77 per cent), increased efficiency (74 per cent) and increased revenue (62 per cent). Employees in these organisations also have higher wellbeing and are happier overall. In comparison, leaders that don’t have formal tracking in place still report benefits from AI use, but on a smaller scale. These include 61 per cent increased productivity, 66 per cent increased efficiency and only 33 per cent increased revenue.
However, over two thirds of business leaders don’t have the systems in place to measure the impact of AI usage. A lack of guidelines or knowing what to measure, visibility, and relevant talent and skill sets were cited as the top challenges to achieving this.
AI adoption is seeing a rise in Heads of AI and a need for workforce upskilling
Heads of AI are on the rise, and thanks to the accessible nature of generative AI, leaders in non-technology-led roles, like business and marketing, are taking on the responsibility.
As AI adoption grows, so will the demand for AI-related roles. In fact, 81 per cent of business leaders expect their organisation to hire more roles to support AI rollout and implementation. Business leaders in New South Wales have the highest average planned AI investment at approximately $48,000 over the next year; almost double that of Victoria. Additionally, only 14 per cent of business leaders plan on using free AI tools over the next 12 months. However, while 69 per cent of business leaders expect their organisation to employ a Head of AI in the next year, for organisation-wide adoption and usage to increase, there must be clear pathways for AI to be implemented into everyday processes.
Beyond this, there is a growing recognition of the need to adapt existing workforces through upskilling or reskilling. As AI use matures, businesses will begin to identify opportunities for automation, empowering AI to undertake labour intensive tasks enabling the human workforce to use this new freed capacity to take on more strategic work. This is likely to have a positive impact on job satisfaction and employee well-being. Almost two thirds (64 per cent) of Australian business leaders have plans to restructure or redeploy their workforce as AI is used more frequently in their work. Increased AI adoption will also help to level the playing field, ensuring SMBs can compete with largescale workforces.
“In Australia, we are seeing increased demand for AI-skilled workers as businesses look to better incorporate this technology into their everyday processes. This is particularly prevalent in the financial services, professional services and IT sectors. Furthermore, PwC research suggests that as AI adoption in these industries grows, job growth is expected to slow. This indicates a need for workers to develop new skills to adapt to the changing job landscape,” Bognar said.
From SEO to LMO: the end of search as we know it, and its new starting point
The rise of AI is also impacting the way we use search. Now, AI technologies like language learning models (LLMs) offer a conversational interface with contextually relevant search that rivals ‘traditional’ search engines.
Already, 51 per cent of business leaders that use AI to search say they have reduced their use of traditional search engines like Google or Bing.
Beyond this, 74 per cent say AI chat models have become their default search function compared to traditional search. This is only set to grow with 89 per cent of business leaders saying they expect their use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity to increase over the next 12 months.
“Search is evolving to where the user is — on the go and on the device they’re using. Voice is becoming the dominant form of interaction and it will be important for businesses to support all of these modes. As AI becomes more integrated in the day-to-day running of businesses, the next big shift will be agentic AI. That is, AI agents that can take action on our behalf, freeing people up to focus on the more strategic work they need to do,” Bognar said.
In the coming years, AI will become so integrated in how we think of technology that it will no longer be referred to as ‘AI-powered’. Instead, it will simply be part of how we think about and use technology.
“HubSpot is focused on the practical applications of AI — making it fast to set up, easy to use, and powered by data that businesses have. We are creating custom AI agents that every business can use, regardless of the size of company or industry segment,” he concluded.
