Early adopters of AI in A/NZ region focus on quality, proven use cases

A global study by IT services giant Infosys is helping to highlight how AI adoption trends in the A/NZ region differ from global approaches, with a focus on quality implementations over quantity.

Infosys regional head for the Asia-Pacific Andrew Groth said A/NZ region data from the company’s global survey showed early adopters were spending cautiously, prioritising proven use cases.

Infosys’ Generative AI Radar found that Australian companies achieve higher effectiveness of spending on generative AI than most Asian, European and North American counterparts.

“They had an effectiveness score of 17.4, representing the percentage of companies that would create business value from generative AI for every 0.01% of GDP spent,” Groth said. “This is more than triple the North American score.”

Delayed adoption was allowing Australia and New Zealand to avoid pitfalls seen in regions with rushed deployments, leading to more strategic investments and benefitting from the lessons learned in larger global markets.

In terms of workforce preparedness, A/NZ firms also had a relatively high numbers of “trailblazers” within their businesses, indicating companies are leading in preparing their workforce for AI.

“One important contributing factor in terms of the delayed adoption can be attributed to the lag in leading cloud hyperscalers making their key offerings generally available to the Australia and New Zealand regionm” Groth said.

For example, AWS Bedrock was generally available in the US region in September 2023 but wasn’t available in Australia until April 2024. Similarly, the NVIDIA A100 series GPUs were available in the US long before they could be used on any hyperscaler in Australia.

By segment, the financial services industry was being held back somewhat by its reliance on legacy components and infrastructure.

Infosys’ AI Business Value Radar recommends focusing on enterprise AI capability through preparing the workforce, building data readiness, and setting up a centralised AI task force.

Workforce preparation was an area where A/NZ companies particularly stood out – with 24% in the “trailblazer” category, with established change management and AI training processes, compared with 16% in other regions.

The report recommended organising an AI “foundry” to hypothesize, test and learn from smaller scale implementations alongside an AI “factory” to scale successful ideas out of the foundry.

“By starting small with highly credible agentic AI use cases, Australia and New Zealand organisations can jump start their AI strategy and put in place the key foundations for enterprise AI,” Groth said.

“Large organisations in the Australia and New Zealand region can now run major transformational initiatives with the delays in availability of AI services being a thing of the past.”

Analysis indicated A/NZ companies were pursuing operations, software development and workforce more than do other regions.

Operations, IT, and facilities and cybersecurity and resilience use cases were more likely to be successful in A/NZ than other use cases.

Workforce, marketing, and product development were, however, less likely to be successful in A/NZ than other AI categories.

Logistics and life sciences showed a higher likelihood of success in A/NZ than other industries. While manufacturing companies overall were less likely to find success with their AI implementations, those within the A/NZ region were doing somewhat better.

Speaking to the overall research results Infosys executive vice-president and chief delivery officer Satish H. C. said enterprise AI was ready to scale.

“With effective use of data architecture, operating models, and employee readiness, businesses can accelerate their adoption of AI to achieve measurable success, he said.

“Our research indicates that agentic AI is critical to operating model transformation. We expect this to develop significantly over the coming year to become the driving force of enterprise transformation as it reshapes business processes, operating models, and technical architectures.”

Last month, Infosys bought Australian cyber security firm The Missing Link for A$98 million.