Australia’s AI Ecosystem Momentum

For the last decade, we observed artificial intelligence (AI) adoption evolve from a futuristic promise pursued by early adopters with mature technology teams, to a legitimate and rapidly growing priority shared by many C-suite and senior leaders across functions. Organisations across industries in Australia continue to identify new use cases to embed AI technologies and tools. They are engaging with a robust network of ecosystem partners across the AI value chain to navigate their adoption journey and maximise the potential benefits.

As the rate of AI adoption continues to grow so do the opportunities (and requirement) for collaboration among ecosystem players. Collaboration is essential to respond to the growing need for more creativity, trust, and delivery of the capabilities a national AI ecosystem needs to fully harness the potential for AI transformation of Australia’s technology landscape. These technologies are pivotal to increasing productivity, improving experiences and innovations through automating routine work, generating intelligence-based conversations, and processing large amounts of data. Continue reading to understand the state of Australia’s AI ecosystem and how Australian businesses plan to benefit from adopting AI.

The National AI Centre (NAIC) commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the state of AI adoption and innovation in Australia. To explore this topic, Forrester conducted an online survey of two hundred respondents and four qualitative interviews targeting IT and business decision-makers, as well as AI service providers in Australia (see Appendix A and B for demographic details). The study found that Australian businesses are growth-focused, using AI technologies across the organisation to gain competitive advantage and improve strategic decision-making.

In this study, we consider AI technology to include, but not be limited to, any technology (hardware and/or software elements) that is utilised to improve business performance and outcomes through the automation of tasks, interactions, decision‑making, and data analytics. AI systems can be programmed to perform specific tasks such as reasoning, planning, natural language processing, computer vision, audio processing, interaction, prediction, process automation, text analytics, machine learning, and more.

AI third-party services refer to but are not limited to, advisory services and any other supporting service or area of expertise that enables AI technology and its associated business systems. This is inclusive of its entire lifecycle, from strategy, testing, deployment, maintenance, and optimisation.