Unlocking Australia's growth potential: Insights from the 2024 AI Jobs Barometer

Confirming what many of us suspected, our inaugural AI Jobs Barometer helps us quantify the potential productivity benefits and workforce impacts from AI. This landmark global study analysed over half a billion job ads from 15 countries and global productivity data to calculate its true impact on job skills, wages, hiring, productivity and more.

The study revealed that the sectors more exposed to AI are experiencing almost five times higher growth in labour productivity, with AI skills carrying up to a 25% wage premium in some markets.

For Australia, the study found a clear increase in demand for AI-skilled workers over the past 12 years – predominantly in financial services, professional services and the information and communication sectors.¹ It also revealed an associated wage premium, up to 17% for some roles.

While the numbers are promising, the data shows that Australia needs to do more to keep pace with global trends. AI demand growth was 36% lower in Australia compared with the global benchmark, and the average AI wage premium was, on average, 8 percentage points lower than the global average.

Australia has tremendous opportunity to apply AI to lift its productivity growth rate (currently one of the lowest in the OECD²) and to help generate economic growth. There are many areas in which we are well positioned to lead globally, such as AI innovation in agriculture, mining and resources, and research-industry partnerships in scalable and responsible AI.

Each and all of us have a role to play in furthering Australia’s reputation as a global AI leader by advancing the application of AI within our own businesses. This article explores the state of AI adoption in Australia and the practical steps that business leaders can take to better unlock the benefits from AI. The opportunities for AI span further than just productivity, however productivity is the core focus for this study and article.

Where are Australian businesses today?

Organisations in Australia are at varying levels of AI adoption. Our recent CEO Survey³ indicated that while 60% of Australia’s CEOs surveyed believe that generative AI (GenAI) will significantly change the way their company creates, delivers and captures value in the next three years, fewer than 25% had started. There are lots of reasons for this. CEOs are juggling conflicting needs,⁴ there are different levels of understanding on the business case for AI implementations, and in a cost-constrained environment there’s a need to make tough decisions, and balance short and long-term priorities to ensure organisations are future-fit.

The pace of AI adoption varies considerably across industry groups. For example, the penetration rate for generative AI among technology, media, and communications organisations is almost double the penetration reported by health services organisations – 46% compared to 25%.

Generative AI adoption, by industry

Why such a substantial difference? Every industry will be impacted by AI, but not equally, and the ‘risk-reward’ ratio for AI adoption can look quite different between each industry group. For software providers, AI is a strategic imperative because it's disrupting core products and services. For other industries, such as health, energy and utilities it’s a way to unlock greater operational efficiency and to improve margins but it’s not demanding the same urgency for business model change today.

Taking the next steps: Where can Australian business be tomorrow? 

With the professional services sector being a ‘frontrunner’ in AI’s threat of disruption to knowledge work, we ultimately decided to make a US$1bn investment in GenAI,⁵ to set up a Global AI Factory, to build ChatPwC⁶ and to help us keep-pace as a market leader in AI professional services.⁷ We’re 12 months into this three-year investment, and we’ve learned a lot along the way.

Wherever you are as an organisation on your AI journey, we’ve found the following to be 5 key factors for successful GenAI adoption:

5 Key Success Factors for GenAI in Business

An informed Board and Executives
For AI to be effectively integrated and used within organisations, leadership must first understand the technology, its potential applications, and associated risks. Consider running AI literacy and upskilling for your Board and Executive team; and challenge your peers to get ‘hands on’ with the tech to understand its potential and impact. Our CEO Survey⁸ showed that the CEOs of organisations that have started experimenting with AI are, on average, twice as optimistic about the potential benefits it will have for their business compared with those who have not started adopting generative AI.

Enterprise-grade technology
Not all generative AI platforms are made equal. Free or consumer-oriented offerings generally won't meet the expectations that your organisation has for handling confidential and personal information. However, not every organisation needs to invest in a ‘ChatPwC’⁹ equivalent. The necessity of bespoke, in-house GenAI platforms will depend on your industry, specific business needs, and whether the goal is to keep pace with or outpace peers. 

Getting fit-for-purpose GenAI platforms into peoples’ hands (with the right safeguards and training – see below) empowers your workforce to leverage the technology in their day-to-day tasks. For example, drafting documents more efficiently, supporting data analysis, and writing complex formulas for a spreadsheet. All of the ‘small wins’ can often add up to meaningful time savings.

Jahanzeb Azim, our PwC Australia Generative AI Advisory Leader, states “As the AI impact to individual productivity evolves, embedding into systems and as an integral component of reimagined processes – working in semi autonomous fashion – AI has the potential to deliver a broader transformative impact for teams, functions and your business as a whole.”

Alignment with business problems and needs
Think of generative AI as one part of the broader ‘toolkit’ that you bring to solve business problems, rather than pursuing generative AI as the ‘outcome’. Your investments should be led by business needs and ‘problems to solve’, and generative AI isn’t always the right solution to every problem.

Rather than creating a standalone AI strategy, how do you incorporate AI into your organisation’s business strategy? It may seem like nuance but the difference is profound. As our Consulting Leader, Ro Antao, puts it, your business doesn’t need a digital strategy¹⁰ – “anything becomes possible once you stop thinking about digital strategy in a vacuum.”

An empowered workforce
Your organisation needs ‘AI confident’ and ‘AI competent’ staff who are well-versed in using generative AI effectively. They need to feel supported and enabled by AI. This often requires a cultural shift within the organisation, encouraging experimentation and innovation, which can be promoted by leadership. AI needs to be seen by its workforce as a tool for transformation rather than a disruptive force.

As our AI Jobs Barometer confirms in Australia the rate of AI job postings has increased by a factor of 4.5 since 2012.¹¹ I can only see this trend continuing, and workers seeking higher wages that come with AI skills may look elsewhere if their own organisation is too slow to embrace it. People and Culture leaders need to invest in AI skills for their workforce to remain competitive. 

Our Asia Pacific Workforce Leader Norah Seddon shares some helpful tips on how to successfully embed AI within workplace culture¹² and win the war for talent. In short, embedding a ‘future of work’ narrative, empowering your people to influence your AI plans and ‘upskill, upskill, upskill’!

Scalable AI governance
Across your business, generative AI will either be used in a controlled way or an uncontrolled way, and the legal and regulatory implications¹³ of using AI in an uncontrolled way are only becoming more complex. From our experience, blocking generative AI from use or outlawing it simply doesn’t work – it’s becoming so ubiquitous through the software and devices that people use every day, that establishing clear guidelines for staff is a ‘must’. If you haven’t already, consider developing a risk appetite statement on your organisation’s use of AI and a risk-based set of controls for governing its use commensurate with the ‘cost of failure’. Your approach to AI risk management¹⁴ should be integrated into your broader enterprise risk management framework, including your technology and data governance frameworks. However at its core AI is a business risk, not a technology risk.

To conclude, our AI Jobs Barometer identified substantial benefits of AI for business, individuals and society at large. If Australia is to not just compete but excel on the world stage, we must embrace AI to grow productivity and prosperity, and ensure the benefits are shared. Currently, AI is both an opportunity, but also a risk to Australia’s productivity and global competitiveness should we not fully turn it to our advantage as other countries are already doing. It is within our control. How we choose to respond will shape our future trajectory.