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The Reinvention Imperative: Why CEOs need to face into technological disruption
Global megatrends
- CEOs see potential for generative AI to grow productivity and value creation.
- Generative AI is yet to be adopted by Australia’s business leaders at an enterprise scale,
- 60% of Australia’s CEOs surveyed believe generative AI will significantly change the way their company creates, delivers and captures value in the next three years
Now’s definitely the time for companies in Australia to speed up their business model reinvention — and that urgency is backed up by data from PwC’s new 27th Annual Global CEO Survey - Australian insights.
CEOs of Australia’s leading companies told us that they’re transforming their business models in response to global megatrends including technological disruption and climate risk - but are they acting fast enough?
Our survey of more than 4700 CEOs worldwide reveals most are adopting new technologies and exploring generative AI’s potential for productivity gains.
Transformation and generative AI
Of those CEOs surveyed in Australia, we found that although generative AI is yet to be broadly adopted at scale across local enterprises, local CEOs see its opportunities and potential value, especially when it comes to new products or services.
So what impact will generative AI have on your business and value creation?
Business leaders tell us they’ll be primarily focused on using generative AI to drive efficiency. This focus tells us that there’s also significant opportunities for companies to leverage generative AI for top-line growth where this technology can help transform business models, differentiate products and services, improve customer and employee experiences, and uplift quality, safety and risk management.
Indeed, 60% of local CEOs believe generative AI will significantly change the way their company creates, delivers and captures value in the next three years.
Source: PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO Survey
Business leaders are also concerned about potential cybersecurity risks posed by this technology. Most CEOs in Australia (78%) believe generative AI is likely to increase risks to their company from phishing attacks and data breaches over the next 12 months, higher than their global peers (64%).
Source: PwC’s Annual Global CEO Survey 2024
No time like the present
So as long as they can manage risks, what’s holding Australia’s CEOs back from embracing generative AI and transforming their businesses?
The survey reveals complex barriers to digital transformation. CEOs say their biggest barriers to reinvention are regulation and competing operational priorities — compliance, technology implementation, workforce management, cost reduction and economic uncertainty — all competing with the need to transform business models. Although CEOs are juggling conflicting needs, business leaders need to make tough decisions, balancing short and long-term priorities to ensure their organisations are future fit.
Surprisingly, Australia’s CEOs generally think they have more time. Our data shows that 85% of CEOs surveyed say their business would still be viable 10 years from now even if they were to stay on the same path - compared to just 53% globally. So how can CEOs reset their priorities?
Four actions CEOs can take right now
- Accelerate responsibly with generative AI: Organisations that lead the way with generative AI are investing in the foundations that are needed for scaling AI. They approach AI holistically. They are using generative AI as an opportunity for business-led transformation. They target their strategically important problems and apply generative AI as one part of an end-to-end solution. They align generative AI priorities to business objectives, encourage experimentation and demonstrate small-scale success to build momentum and experience.
- Recalibrate your time horizon: How long can your company continue to make most of its revenue from the same brand-defining products and services that you’ve relied on over the past five years. Our Accelerating Performance research shows top-performing companies are six times more likely to have increased investment in whole-of-business transformation by greater than 30% over the past three years.
- Streamline operations to support growth: Many local CEOs focus inwards on ‘cost out’ in response to economic pressures and regulatory compliance. But inefficient ways of working slow the decision-making processes. Leading companies use cloud technologies and APIs to streamline their operations, enabling them to adjust more quickly to market opportunities and improve their value to customers.
- Shift from value-creating to value-sharing: Top-performing companies create partnerships and ecosystems to share value and improve their sustainability. Our Accelerating Performance research shows that Australia’s leading organisations are more likely than their global peers to participate in ecosystems to gain access to value through new data, insights, customers, and markets.
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Contact the authors
Partner, Generative AI Advisory Leader, PwC Australia