Displaying items by tag: Research

Australian investment into Asian start-ups has surged over the past decade, totalling $23.8 billion from 2013 to 2023, according to a new paper from Asialink Business and the Tech Council of Australia (TCA).

GUEST RESEARCH  ProHance, a new-age workplace analytics and operations enablement platform, today released the results of its latest Global Productivity Benchmarking Report.

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.

Global technology company Epson is collaborating with the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA) on the development of new fibre recycling technology using Dry Fibre Technology.

New research from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has revealed new Australian homes are up to 50 per cent more airtight than those tested in 2015.

GUEST RESEARCH:  Analysis identifies ransomware trends across various industries and geographies

COMPANY NEWS:  Companies developing methodology and open-source tools to tame complexities of complex language, empowering organizations to get and stay ahead of attackers

• 95% of respondents in education sector plan to increase public cloud storage budgets in 2024, according to the Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index
• 92% of respondents in education sector plan to Increase amount of data stored in the public cloud in 2024, according to the Wasabi Global Cloud Storage Index

GUEST RESEARCH: Colleges and universities worldwide are increasing their publiccloud infrastructure and storage usage and budgets to keep pace with the needs of their institutions. The Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index found that 95% of respondents from the education sector plan to increase public cloud storage budgets over the next year. Not only is this rate impressively high, it is also five percentage points higher compared to the overall survey average of 90%. Furthermore, 92% of education respondents expect the amount of data their organization stores in the public cloud to increase over the next year.

COMPANY NEWS:  

• The vast majority (80%) have increased their year-on-year investment in generative AI
• Three quarters agree it is helping drive revenue and innovation
• Almost all organizations (97%) allow employees to use generative AI in some capacity

SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre (SmartSat CRC) announced the first four new jointly funded space research projects and opened funding opportunities in partnership with New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE).

GUEST OPINION: This week’s inquiry into the use of Deep Fakes in Australian schools, combined with the increasing use of Deep Fakes by political figures both in Australia and abroad, are worrisome developments. It signals we are in a rapidly evolving arms race to research and develop effective and reliable deep fake detection tools.

GUEST OPINION:  The evolving ability of physical security teams to deploy faster and introduce new management and analytics capabilities is accelerating their adoption of hybrid cloud.

GUEST RESEARCH:  New research from Humanforce reveals that close to half of the 500 Australian workers it surveyed have switched jobs in the past year. Despite a sharp increase in living costs, the driving force for 54% of these workers finding a new employer was not higher pay, but the pursuit of better work-life balance and wellbeing.

Academic technology solutions provider Turnitin unveiled its new AI paraphrasing detection feature, integrated within Turnitin’s AI writing capabilities.

At Elastic, Gavin leads ANZ operations, drives business development, and shapes strategy.

Organised data holds the key to successfully adopting AI while improved asset management emerges among top drivers of transformation

COMPANY NEWS: AI is at the forefront of digital transformation in the utilities sector, with 82% of executives recognising it as essential to their strategy. However, despite widespread recognition of the importance of emerging technologies, only a fifth (20%) of companies have completed their digital transformation journey, with respondents split on where ownership should lie (22% reference CFO, while the same percentage cite the CTO).

GUEST RESEARCH:  Financial organisations are leaving themselves significantly exposed to risk in the cloud, according to research from Illumio.

GUEST RESEARCH:  In a world first, Prime Day Australia will run for six days this year (Tuesday, July 16 at 12.01am AEST to Sunday, July 21), with significant growth predicted for 2024, according to new research from global marketplace leader, Pattern.

GUEST RESEARCH:  ShopFully research finds majority of Aussies opt for Click & Collect as the digital and physical shopping worlds collide

AI’s predictive analytics offer significant business opportunity to assess Scope 3 risks, forecast future energy consumption and lower an organisation’s carbon footprint

GUEST RESEARCH: IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl in collaboration with Microsoft today released the Australian findings of the Global Sustainability Barometer study.