Time to punch above our weight and stop shadowboxing on AI
- Written by Anish Mukker, President of TP in Australia
Australia prides itself on being an innovation economy. We celebrate startups, talk about productivity, and lean into our reputation for punching above our weight globally. But when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), too many Australian companies are behaving like cautious spectators rather than serious competitors.
Across boardrooms, AI is being treated as a reputational risk to manage rather than a strategic opportunity to seize. The result? Adoption is happening at dial-up speed in a world that has already moved to fibre.
Yet despite the scale of opportunity, many Australian companies remain cautious. This hesitation is not entirely irrational. Banks, insurers, telcos and major retailers already endure relentless political and regulatory attention. After a decade of royal commissions, parliamentary inquiries and class actions, caution has hardened into paralysis.
No chief executive wants to be accused of replacing workers with algorithms in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. No board wants to trigger a union campaign about “robots taking jobs”.
In too many cases, the loudest question in the boardroom is not “How do we win with AI?” but “How will this look on the front page?”.
We’ve seen this with the Commonwealth Bank’s public frictions over technology-driven job redesign. The political and industrial backlash quickly overshadowed the broader discussion about productivity and capability. One threat from the Industrial Relations Commission and the company backflips. Against that backdrop, executives calculate that an aggressive AI deployment is simply not worth the trouble. But the nature of the global workforce is changing whether we are ready or not.
Forecasts across financial services alone suggest that AI will have a significant impact on headcounts in the next 12-18 months. In some business process outsourcing functions, global estimates point to potential reductions of up to 30 per cent as automation takes hold.
Australia, with its relatively limited outsourcing base, has so far been somewhat insulated from this shift. But insulation is not the same as immunity.
In the US and across Asia, AI is being embedded at scale across credit assessment, fraud detection, pricing, customer service and back-office automation. Productivity gains are being banked now, and the savings are being reinvested into growth.
Meanwhile many Australian organisations are still experimenting with small AI pilots, treating the technology as an occasional add-on rather than the operational backbone it is rapidly becoming.
Yet delay does not stop disruption: it simply means someone else captures the advantage first.
AI can process insurance claims in minutes rather than days, detect fraud patterns humans would miss and resolve routine customer queries at a fraction of the cost of traditional service models.
Delaying this transition does not stop disruption; it simply ensures that a global rival captures the advantage first. Similarly, an organisation that hesitates to automate core processes is not protecting jobs, it is protecting inefficiency. Most Australians understand that technology is changing efficiencies and the way we will work in the future. What they resent is being blindsided. The lesson from the past is simple: bring your people with you.
The real competitive edge will come from upskilling and redeploying workers to operate alongside AI, not pretending the technology can be held at bay. This requires transparent engagement with employees and unions, investment in retraining, and honest conversations about role evolution.
In a service economy, the basics still matter and the human element will always remain crucial. Customers still want empathy, judgement, and accountability when something goes wrong, that’s what we call efficient and elevated customer experience management.
For CX, no algorithm can compensate for a business that fails to answer the phone or resolve a complaint properly. AI should be used to eliminate the mundane tasks we loathe, allowing us to focus on the high-value interactions that actually move the needle; At TP we call it the ‘High-tech, High-touch and High-standard’ approach.
But excessive caution carries its own risks. Avoiding awkward headlines today could leave Australian companies facing a structural productivity gap tomorrow in an economy that cannot afford to fall further behind.
Australia has always prided itself on punching above its weight globally, but when it comes to AI too many businesses are shadowboxing. The rest of the world has already stepped into the ring.
