How Australian business leaders are approaching AI

How are leading organisations turning AI ambition into measurable business impact?

Stuart Munro, Group Executive, Group Strategy, CommBank, noted at CommBank’s Accelerate AI event that the acceleration of AI represents an “exceptional moment in history”.

“Top-down leadership, and leadership in general, is hugely important,” he says.

As AI continues to scale, here are five things that leaders from financial services, retail and professional services say has been important to success in their approach to technology so far.

1. Transparency in change management

As AI reshapes roles and workflows, organisations that are progressing fastest while maintaining trust are those making change visible and understandable for their people. Research from PwC shows the skills sought by employers are changing 66% faster in the jobs most exposed to AI.

CommBank CEO Matt Comyn says that while the bank added 2000 employees to the business last calendar year, its skills mix is evolving. To build transparency around this change, the bank recently launched the Grow Your Career platform, which maps every role to show employees how technology can support aspects of their work, the transferable skills they’re developing and how they can build new, in-demand skills.

Comyn says transparency is vital to successful change management and that trust provides “permission to scale”.

“This technology attracts an enormous amount of attention and there’s a lot changing around people – I feel that personally in learning some of those new skills,” he says. “There are things we know will be important, like human judgement, good communication and empathy, but some skills are emerging. This has been a big focus for us.”

“There are things we know will be important, like human judgement, good communication and empathy, but some skills are emerging.” – Matt Comyn, CEO, CommBank

2. Leaning into disruption

Law firms have long generated revenue through billable hours, but as AI increasingly automates labour-intensive tasks like contract review and due diligence, the backbone of firm revenue is being challenged. Research from Thomson Reuters shows 80% of law firm professionals expect the future of their industry to be transformed by AI.

Sam Nickless, CEO of Gilbert + Tobin, notes the importance of “leaning in” and trying to “be at the forefront of change”.

“How we judge the performance of people through billable hours becomes an almost meaningless concept. I still believe there’ll be a premium that clients will want to pay for judgement, but it will be for the very best judgement,” says Nickless, who points to a shift toward outcomes-based business models.

“It is a big change in professional services and not everyone will be able to make that change.”

3. Seizing new competitive advantages

For retail giants like Coles, competitive advantage was once determined by the scale of physical networks and the buying power it delivered. In the age of AI, Coles CEO Leah Weckert says competitive advantage will be driven by the scale and usability of data, and how agentic AI can improve the end-to-end value chain.

“Being able to use this end-to-end orchestration and optimisation to constantly tune and hone the business to a position where we have lower cost to operate on a lot of our different functions, that will be a big competitive advantage if we can achieve that going forward,” she explains.

4. Building capability and confidence

AI implementation requires empowering teams with the right tools and training. Last calendar year, Coles rolled out ChatGPT and Copilot to all store support-centre team members. Weckert says the success of the AI implementation relied on investing in high-quality tools, providing practical training and building team confidence that tools would be used safely.

“A lot of the team were very nervous about data accidentally leaking or being responsible for a data breach, so the training we put around responsible use and guardrails meant we had higher confidence to take it up,” says Weckert.

“This meant that from when we went live with the whole team, it took us about 10 weeks to get to around 75% adoption, where the team member was using it at least weekly, which is a strong result.”

“It took us about 10 weeks to get to around 75% adoption, where the team member was using [AI] at least weekly, which is a strong result.” – Leah Weckert, CEO, Coles

5. Managing governance and risk

AI presents huge opportunities, but Nickless stresses the importance of understanding the risks it presents, adhering to client and customer expectations, and reassuring your people that your tools are reliable.

“I think everyone still needs to be very focused on the way in which you manage data governance, particularly as we go agentic,” he says. “What is the data that flows into the agent and what context does it have?

“I think everyone still needs to be very focused on the way in which you manage data governance, particularly as we go agentic.” – Sam Nickless, CEO, Gilbert + Tobin

“Being a law firm serving multiple clients, we have to be very careful with that because we need to put data governance around things like whether an agent can look at a particular client’s information for a particular task, but it can’t look at any other clients.’

“That slows us down because we have to get that right, but it’s very important.”