GUEST RESEARCH: New Salesforce research reveals generative AI is among the top three business priorities for 81 per cent of Australian C-suite executives.

According to the Salesforce report nearly 300 leaders from large businesses across the country, 50 per cent said their organisation currently had a clear and defined generative AI strategy, while a further 42 per cent said they had started working on a generative AI strategy for their business.

Why it matters: Today, every company wants to be an AI company.

Research suggests, companies that haven’t already implemented AI risk losing significant ground to competitors, and this could happen more quickly than anticipated, as we move from chatbots to copilots to autonomous AI agents. This next great leap forward will feature agentic systems, which can be thought of as trusted digital colleagues as opposed to digital assistants.

C-suite executives said the key motivations driving generative AI adoption were:

• Enhanced productivity (43%)
• Innovative customer and employee experiences (42%)
• Obtaining a competitive edge in a dynamic market (41%).

Go deeper: Aussie C-suite executives are bullish on generative AI integration and are taking decisive action to ensure its success. The CEO is seen as being the most responsible for ensuring generative AI is successfully integrated (40%) and teams enabled, followed by the CIO/CTO (29%), and department heads (17%).

When asked where generative AI would have the biggest positive business impact, C-suite executives identified information technology (41%), operations (35%), customer service (31%) and marketing (29%).

Despite being widely used, however, over 92 per cent of C-suite executives said they believed there were still barriers to adoption of generative AI in their business today. Data factors were high on the list of barriers, including:

• Accessibility and inclusivity (31%)
• Generative AI producing inaccurate outputs (31%)
• The use of incomplete customer/company data to train AI models (30%)
• Lack of data privacy and security (28%)
• The use of out-of-date public data to train generative AI models (25%).

Customer perspective: “One of the reasons we recently expanded our agreement with Salesforce to include Einstein 1 was to use it to unlock the potential of generative AI across our business. But we wanted to do it in a deliberate way, so it's easy to build, grow and evolve as the business does,” said Jeremy Burton, CTO, hipages Group. “With Einstein’s generative AI, we’re excited about how it will help us create a better experience for our contact centre team, especially with how they engage the most important stakeholders on our platform: our tradies.
“If we can create a better experience for these customer-facing teams, we’ll be creating real value for our business with improved efficiency across these functions.”

The Salesforce perspective: The race is on to embrace generative AI and do it well, and that is nowhere more clearly felt than among business leaders.

That’s why we’re delivering the generative AI that gives customers the higher productivity, value customer relationships and margins they expect. Innovations include Einstein Service Agent and Einstein Sales Agents, built on the Einstein 1 Platform and powered by Data Cloud.

Customers need the confidence that their data is secure and trustworthy. That’s why we developed the Einstein Trust Layer which lets customers get the benefit of generative AI without compromising their data security and privacy controls.

“I’ve seen firsthand the pressure CEOs and other leaders are under to get this right, and quickly, to both deliver measurable value and remain competitive. We’ve made significant progress in a short time, but we’re still just scratching the surface when it comes to how generative AI can unlock the trapped value in many businesses,” said Frank Fillmann, General Manager ANZ, Salesforce.

“This is why we are laser focused on being trusted AI advisors to our customers, helping them with the roadmap to responsible innovation to support their customers and employees. Every AI conversation is a ROI conversation as we help more Australian businesses augment their teams with AI to improve productivity and accelerate growth.”

Methodology: Salesforce commissioned YouGov to conduct a double-anonymous online survey of C-suite leaders of large businesses in Australia. The research was conducted from 16th-23rd July 2024 and yielded responses from 288 C-suite executives across a variety of departments at companies with 250 or more employees.