In recognition of AI Appreciation Day 7 Tech leaders share their thoughts regarding the future of AI and how it is changing the world.
Janine Morris, Industry Engagement and Strategy Lead at AvePoint
Through the rapid evolution of AI over the recent years, it has become evident that AI presents significant opportunities for the economy. Recent research by TCA predicts that AI is expected to create 200,000 jobs in Australia by 2030. This leads to a productivity uplift and injecting billions of dollars into the economy. Through this journey, AI is positioned to transform the workforce.
At present, AI is still in its infancy and is not a threat to jobs. However, through its transformative potential for automation, AI is already starting to redefine some organisational roles as businesses are increasingly turning to AI to automate routine tasks. Automation reduces the need for manual, repetitive work, allowing employees to focus on more strategic, creative, and complex tasks. This shift will lead to the emergence of new job categories, such as AI specialists, data scientists, and machine learning engineers, and will require the reskilling and upskilling of the current workforce. AI will also augment human capabilities, enabling better decision-making and improving productivity across various industries. Ultimately, AI will create a more efficient, innovative, and dynamic workforce.
Simon Berglund, Senior Vice President & General Manager APAC, Diligent
As organisations continue to face a dynamic and evolving risk landscape, it is vital to turn data into strategic intelligence to proactively anticipate and mitigate risks. AI has the potential to enhance how organisations manage and mitigate risks, ensure compliance with regulations, and elevate their overall governance practices. By leveraging effective AI powered tools, organisations will be able to identify risks, safeguard data and democratise the decision-making processes, driving resilience and empowering organisations with certainty and clarity like never before.
AI will also be a game changer for audit, risk and compliance teams as it can enable them to stay on top of compliance requirements by tracking, categorising and deciphering regulatory changes. This ensures that policies and controls remain proactive and adaptive.
Board members and leaders can also benefit from AI's ability to distill critical insights from vast datasets, facilitating informed decision-making and strategic actions. By automating the creation of board materials and executive summaries, AI liberates business leaders to focus on collaborative, data-driven decision-making, ultimately driving organisational resilience and agility in a dynamic regulatory landscape.
Nicole Kelly, CEO and Founder, TaxTank
AI is unquestionably revolutionising industries worldwide, and the tax sector is no exception. The ATO has been utilising AI to enhance its data analysis and compliance measures for several years now, setting a high standard for efficiency and accuracy. However, private sector innovations like TaxTank are stepping up to compete by leveraging AI to simplify tax processes for everyday Australians.
At TaxTank, we harness the power of AI to provide real-time tax solutions that are user-friendly and efficient. Our platform integrates live bank feeds and intelligent tax schedules, ensuring that users can manage their taxes year-round and claim every possible deduction. This not only levels the playing field against the sophisticated systems of the ATO but also empowers individuals and small businesses to take control of their financial health with ease and affordability.
As AI continues to advance, we envision a future where tax management is fully automated, significantly reducing errors and enhancing compliance. The primary challenge for private companies will be to stay abreast of these rapid advancements and continually innovate to meet the increasing demands for simplicity and accuracy in tax affairs. This includes ensuring user confidence and compliance with the ever-evolving and complex tax legislation.
Jonathan Kenny, Chief Operations Officer, SiteMinder
AI is bringing about the next evolution of doing business, where we can work smarter. At SiteMinder, for example, which services the global hotel industry – an industry that lags many others in the adoption of digital technology – AI-based tools are being used to answer frequently asked questions from customers and to triage their enquiries. This capability has allowed our teams to spend less time on routine work, and more time solving complex customer problems and adding greater value. As an organisation servicing hotel businesses that are live 24/7, these tools are also enabling more conversations with customers in real-time. When you have customers in more than 150 countries globally, being able to respond quickly to their queries, in their language, is important. AI-based technologies have helped us to continue adding this value while streamlining the overall customer experience.
Looking at the future of AI, I anticipate more of these value-adding use cases that enhance the customer experience while improving operational efficiency to be front and centre of how businesses adopt AI-based technologies.
As AI grows in its ability to decipher big data, we’ll also see more teams make the shift from updating spreadsheets to applying automated, consumable insights to their commercial decision-making processes. In the hotel industry, we regularly see many of our customers too stretched to be able to think critically and strategically beyond what is already in place and working for them. By leveraging AI-based data insights, though, they will be able to identify new revenue streams that would otherwise go unnoticed. Real-time alerts on changing market conditions, for example, can prompt them to update their pricing and, in doing so, be more dynamic and competitive. In this way, AI will increasingly level the playing field, especially among smaller businesses that lack the time and resources to compete effectively.
Nina Jung, Chief Revenue Officer, Chronos Agency
Leaders can benefit from AI in three main ways: productivity gains, aid in decision-making, and hyper-personalisation of customer experiences. Particularly in the ecommerce sector, AI is enabling brands to efficiently analyse and forecast user data based on purchase history, segment audiences, and understand what kind of content would be most effective for engaging audiences in future campaigns. Its ability to draw valuable and immediately actionable insights from first and zero-party data will form an increasingly larger part of how ecommerce, marketing, and technology teams operate in the future.
AI allows time and resources previously dedicated to these activities to be redistributed to more strategic planning and decision making that requires human intelligence and intuition. Moving forward, it's this human intelligence and intuition which will enable businesses to use AI as a tool for business growth.
Matt Quinn, Chief Technology Officer, Tanium
AI has many of the hallmarks of potentially ushering in broad and deep societal change and transformation. As such, AI can be seen as both a threat and an opportunity. Those of us who are protecting assets have a high responsibility to do it right. Bad actors only have to get the use of AI right once, whereas we have a responsibility to get it right every time.
Transparency and ethical concerns are important issues, but this must be balanced with investments to help control the misuse or the abuse of AI technology through compliance and regulatory requirements.
It is also the responsibility of organisations to have a full understanding of what is happening in their environments and to safeguard their assets against the misuse of AI and the misuse or misappropriation of the data used to train the AI.
Joshua McAdam, Chief Operating Officer, SecureCo
AI is not something new, it’s been changing how we live for decades. In the past, however, our day-to-day interactions with AI have been rather clunky, slow and often frustrating. Just think of when you call your bank’s contact centre and get into an argument with a voice bot after repeating your name five times.
As we’ve all witnessed in a rather short amount of time, generative AI has changed the game. If we go back to the contact centre context, conversational AI can have seamless conversations with customers, easily switching between text and voice, and even language. Customers calling their bank can now expect to have real-time, naturally flowing conversations in whatever language they choose with a lot more empathy than we’re used to from customer service voice bots. AI is now also being deployed to personalise experiences as well as pick up on customer sentiment during calls, providing unique training opportunities and improving loyalty.