Australia needs more humans to achieve its AI potential

Australia’s recently reelected Labor Party is banking on AI for a tech-driven productivity boost over the next three years, according to The Conversation. Among five priority areas, the Australian Government Productivity Commission is shaping reforms to build public confidence in data and technology. The organization is also exploring how best to shore up a skilled and adaptable workforce.

Realizing AI potential and securing Australia’s future as a dynamic, knowledge-based economy will require strong technology leadership and access to qualified talent.

AI gap down under

In the past year, Australian enterprises have dropped 10 points in AI maturity, which is on par with declines across the Asia-Pacific region and the U.S., according to the latest ServiceNow Enterprise AI Maturity Index. This highlights a critical gap between AI advances and organizations’ capacity to harness the financial and productivity benefits of AI.

The findings show that only 33% of Aussie leaders have a clear AI vision. Meanwhile, 82% globally intend to ramp up their AI investments throughout the next year. This gap suggests that many organizations are placing AI bets without clearly understanding how these bets might affect their financial performance, data governance, regulatory compliance, and workforce security.

Small changes, big impacts

The nature of work and skills required is in flux, and employees are more uncertain than ever. This year’s AI Maturity Index survey found that six in 10 Aussies are worried about losing their jobs to AI. Should they be? While there’s no question that AI will change the nature of work and force millions of people to learn new skills, our research does not support the claim that AI will cause mass job losses.

Many factors will affect Australian labor markets over the next five years, including economic demand, demographic trends, and the rise of productivity-boosting technologies such as AI. Overall, the Australian workforce will need to increase by 5.5% to support the country’s expected economic growth, adding a net 790,000 jobs, according to research by ServiceNow and Pearson.¹

The IT sector will grow by 37%, adding 150,000 new jobs to the economy. At the same time, so-called agentic AI systems that work autonomously under human direction will eliminate the equivalent of 670,000 jobs (4.7% of the workforce) by making workers more productive.

Organizations are nearing a tipping point, where weak AI strategy and a lack of mapping mission-critical AI skills will hold them back in a race they can’t afford to lose. Our research identified a cohort of AI Pacesetter companies whose AI strategies have already produced measurable increases in gross margin, efficiency, and productivity.

Multinational mining-services firm Orica deployed ServiceNow Virtual Agent across 35 use cases. As a result, “our deflection rate has gone from 18% to 94%, which is just a massive increase,” says Bradley Hunt, manager of DevOps and regional apps at Orica.

The company is also realizing value in unexpected areas. “Summarizing live chats is our most used AI skill, and AI search is a fan favorite for customers,” he adds. Orica is also saving more than a full day per week in average incident resolution time.

AI priorities for Australian business leaders

Pacesetters in our study concentrate their efforts in two areas above all others:

1. Tighten strategy, connect silos

Despite all the AI hype, enterprise adoption is still in its infancy. Without a cohesive vision from the top, random AI adoption within siloed departments compounds solution sprawl and hampers potential gains. It also exacerbates risk.

The main barrier to realizing AI value is lack of data security. Yet only 43% of Aussie organizations have made significant progress over the past year in formalizing controls and data governance. And just 44% have taken steps to connect data across disparate systems.

By comparison, two-thirds of global Pacesetters run their AI solutions on one enterprisewide platform with a single architecture and data model. This approach makes it easier to keep pace with innovation, bringing teams together around common challenges rather than leaving them to their own territorial agendas and product bloat.

Fonterra, one of the world’s largest dairy operators, is using the ServiceNow AI Platform to unify its IT services, consolidating siloed tools and enabling a 360-degree view of service performance across the enterprise. The company has seen a 92% improvement in mean time to resolution for high-priority incidents and a 90% reduction in event incident tickets. Fonterra is also keeping customers happy, with a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of 95%.

2. Map talent, build trust

Encouragingly, many leaders are doing their homework to understand their future workforce deficits. Nationwide, 71% are in the process of identifying and mapping the skills needed to implement their AI plans.

However, only 37% of Australian leaders strongly agree they have the ideal mix of skills, raising significant questions around training, upskilling, and responsibility ownership. This emerging gap is ringing alarm bells with employees, who are now more fearful of AI job displacement than their counterparts in any other country, according to our research.

Griffith University is ahead of the talent curve. The university is upskilling support teams using  ServiceNow Impact, an AI-powered value acceleration solution designed to boost time to value for new technologies.

“We've appointed a training and development officer as part of our program team, matching course modules with skills gaps for our staff,” says Lori Burdon, delivery lead at the university. “They can then undertake training at their own pace, developing expertise and gaining industry-recognized accreditation in relevant areas.

People and platforms

In the past nine months, new technologies such as agentic AI have progressed with unprecedented speed. Leaders at all levels across every industry must act now to prepare Australia’s workforce for this once-in-a-generation technological impact.

Unlocking the nation’s productivity potential begins with an enterprisewide technology vision and a foundation of future-ready talent.

Gain more insights in our global Enterprise AI Maturity Index report.

¹ ServiceNow and Pearson, 2025 Workforce Skills Report