While public conversations around AI remain dominated by scepticism and concern, Australian brand leaders say adoption is happening quietly behind the scenes – with several people quietly using the technology they fear, but remaining hesitant to openly embrace it.
Speaking at Logitech’s Logi Work event in Sydney during a panel titled ‘Brand Leaders and AI’, Nikki Chowdhury, digital audience lead at Vogue, Rochelle Tognetti, AI evangelist at Adobe, and Shay Hamama, CTO/COO at Luxury Escapes, explored why trust in AI remains low — and why brands need to rethink the way they introduce and communicate the technology.
It comes after a recent Roy Morgan survey found 61 per cent of Australians believe artificial intelligence creates more problems than it solves.
That research also found a quarter Australians believe AI presents a risk of human extinction in the next twenty years.
For Chowdhury, the public conversations around AI which are “heavily shaped by fear” are creating a disconnect between how Australian’s talk about the technology and how they actually use it.
“There’s been this degree of AI washing where businesses have said, ‘We are making our workforce slimmer to make way for AI’, when really they had cash flow issues,” she said.
She argued that these narratives, alongside constant speculation about AI’s impact, have contributed to a broader sense of distrust.
“There’s a lot of tech that we use that we don’t necessarily trust, but we use because of convenience,” she said.
“Do we necessarily trust Google? I don’t know. Do we still use Google Maps to get around? Yes.”
Chowdhury believes AI is facing a similar challenge — where public perception is being shaped less by people’s everyday experiences with the technology and more by the stories surrounding it.
“We don’t really argue whether we should still be using the yellow pages over Google Maps,” she said. “The mythology of it has to compete with the reality of it.”
She pointed to AI’s rapid rise coming at a difficult moment, with consumers already navigating significant social and technological disruption.
“We were reeling from a global pandemic. We were already in a state of overwhelm. We were already doing things vastly differently to how we used to,” she said.
“And then we have this tool come out, which threatens to do that ten times more.”
While headlines often focus on what AI threatens to change, Chowdhury said the practical reality is already showing a different picture.
At Vogue, AI is becoming part of the creative workflow, particularly as media continues moving beyond traditional written formats.
“One of the biggest changes we’ve had is going from purely consuming news and content in written form to video,” she said.
The modern newsroom now requires teams to create across multiple formats, often while working on the move.
“We had editors finishing up show reviews in the Ubers between shows, in the media room, in cafes, in restaurants.”
AI has helped support that shift, with Vogue’s video teams reducing editing time by 40% through AI tools.
“They’re still the ones filming the content. We still have human beings in the content. We still write the scripts,” Chowdhury said.
“What it’s really shown us is that it doesn’t have to be a this-or-that or an us-or-them kind of world. It really could be a conversation between humans, AI and automation.”
For Rochelle Tognetti, the question of trust comes down to transparency and intention.
“Really being intentional around when you’re using artificial intelligence and when you’re using human skills is so fundamentally important,” she said.
She argued that organisations need to think beyond AI as simply a productivity tool and consider how it fits into human behaviour.
“Our brains are not wired for change,” she said. “Actually it is very energy hungry for us to change the way that we think about work.”
With AI arriving alongside broader social and economic pressures, Tognetti warned that businesses risk overwhelming people if they frame adoption purely around speed and efficiency.
“There is a delicate balance between disruption and overwhelm,” she said.
For brands, she said that means “being clearer about where AI creates genuine value — and where human judgement remains essential”
“AI is getting smarter and smarter every day,” she said. “But there are still things that we uniquely can do as humans.”
Luxury Escapes CTO/COO Shay Hamama said one of the biggest misconceptions around AI trust is that consumer behaviour often contradicts what people say.
“There’s the gap between what people say and what people do,” he said. “Most of these people who don’t trust AI still use GPT to get some answers every now and then, and get to shortcut.”
Hamama said the fear around AI is often less about current usage and more about “uncertainty around what the future looks like”.
“There is a fear of future, how the future would look like with AI, which is translated to lack of trust,” he said.
Within Luxury Escapes, the company has already seen customers comfortably engage with AI-powered experiences — but the framing matters.
“Today most of our calls are running through chatbots, through AI, voice AI, or chat,” he said.
However, when customers were immediately told they were speaking with an AI assistant, many reacted negatively.
“So instead we changed it to: ‘You’re in queue to speak to a human. In the meantime, how can I help you?’”
“Then people feel more relaxed, and they share more.”
