Welcome to AI Pulse, KPMG’s quarterly snapshot of how organisations are adopting, scaling and governing AI in real time.
This edition shows Australian and Asia Pacific markets committed to AI and increasingly focused on workforce fluency, cyber security and agentic systems. Yet adoption is moving faster than value realisation: organisations now need stronger role design, governance, cost visibility and outcome measurement to turn experimentation into repeatable business impact.
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Australia’s AI ambition is holding firm
Australian organisations remain committed to AI despite economic uncertainty, but confidence in execution is softer.
- 75% say AI will remain a top investment priority
- 69% say AI is delivering meaningful business value
- Only 2% report that adoption has progressed to established ROI
The priority now is to scale fewer, proven use cases with clear measures of value.
Agentic AI is exposing a specialist capability gap
Australia is broadly keeping pace on advanced agents, but specialist skills and data readiness remain barriers. Sustainable scaling will require architecture, data and operating model capability alongside experimentation.
Workforce fluency is becoming a performance differentiator
AI investment is weighted toward resilience rather than growth
Australian AI budgets favour the foundations of safe scale over innovation and customer growth.
- 62% plan to allocate budget to cyber or data security
- 61% plan to allocate budget to cloud infrastructure
- 33% prioritise innovation
- 25% prioritise customer experience, 14 percentage points below APAC
This defensive tilt may strengthen resilience, but organisations also need a clearer path from controls and infrastructure to growth and customer value.
Cost visibility has not yet become cost discipline
Many Australian organisations can see their total AI costs, but formal monitoring and modelling lag APAC.
- 58% report visibility of total AI cost
- 54% use cost monitoring dashboards, compared with 66% across APAC
- 65% use formal agent cost modelling, compared with 72% across APAC
As agent usage scales, leaders need unit economics, usage controls and value reviews embedded in approval and operating processes.
Top 3 AI priorities in Australia
How KPMG can help
KPMG helps organisations turn AI ambition into real, responsible impact.
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Levi Watters
Head of Digital Build Services & National Sector Lead, Telecommunications
KPMG Australia
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Frequently asked questions
| Australian organisations are showing strong AI maturity and outperforming global peers on investment commitment, value realisation, governance confidence and executive ownership. |
AI ROI is difficult to measure early because many Australian organisations are prioritising trust, governance and security over immediate productivity gains. While this focus is important for responsible and scalable AI adoption, it means fewer organisations are realising measurable returns.
AI agents are enabling organisations to move beyond basic automation to more autonomous, adaptive ways of working. By combining advanced reasoning, planning, data and governance, they can make real-time decisions, collaborate with humans and automate complex processes under appropriate human oversight. The opportunity lies in redesigning how work gets done, while maintaining appropriate governance and human oversight. |
As organisations shift towards multi-agent AI systems that coordinate complex tasks, the risks around governance, accountability and oversight increase. In Australia and around the world, responsible AI is critical to ensure these systems are deployed safely, compliantly and with appropriate human control. Without strong AI governance, risk management and oversight, organisations can face regulatory, legal, reputational and financial consequences, making responsible AI essential as adoption accelerates. |
The biggest barriers are risk management, skills gaps and the complexity of integrating AI across existing systems and processes. For many organisations, execution, not strategy, is now the primary challenge. |
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