How Deeply Have Australian Businesses Actually Integrated AI? One Function Deep, And The Returns Show It
Thomas Derum4 min read
One function deep. Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise research, published on 9 November 2026, has 62 per cent of Australian organisations running AI at scale in IT and cybersecurity, 34 per cent in marketing, sales and customer service, 23 per cent in strategy and operations and 20 per cent in product development. It surveyed 3,500 leaders across 25 countries.
Read that order again. The deepest integration sits in the function that buys the software.
Outstaffer has an interest here, because the alternative to a licence is a person and we publish what one costs.
Australian Adoption At Scale Stops Inside The IT Department
Strategy and operations is where a 30-person business makes or loses its margin. Twenty-three per cent of Australian organisations have AI running at scale there, against 38 per cent globally, with another 69 per cent piloting. Product development sits at 20 per cent here against 33. Only in IT does Australia lead, 62 against 54.
This is not slow adoption. It is adoption that stopped at the edge of the work.
How deeply have Australian businesses actually integrated AI into the work itself?
Not far. Thirty-nine per cent are redesigning several key processes around it, about half report only a minor change in decision-making authority, and 33 per cent plan no change to their organisational design, against 21 per cent globally. Yet 73 per cent expect AI to handle the majority of tasks in routine knowledge work within three years.
A third of respondents expect the work to change and have scheduled no change to who does it.
Australian Businesses Are Nearly Twice As Likely To Be Disappointed
Thirty-five per cent of Australian respondents say their existing AI investments produced less measurable return than expected. Globally it is 19 per cent. That is money already spent and judged short by the people who signed it off.
Why does the return look worse here than it does globally?
Deloitte does not say. My reading: the spend went where the work was already instrumented, so IT could measure what it got. The rest were left on a pilot, and a pilot produces a demo, not a number. The same gap shows up in what businesses expect AI to do to hiring against what they can measure: 8.2 per cent expected, 3.8 observed.
Price It Against What An Hour Of Australian Work Costs
The ABS put full-time adult average weekly ordinary time earnings at $2,083.70 in May 2026, up 3.7 per cent. Across a 38-hour week that is $54.83 an hour and $108,352 a year.
Take your own annual spend on AI tools and divide it by 54.83. That is the hours a year it has to give back before it beats paying somebody, which is the division any software quote has to survive.
Deloitte has 46 per cent planning to lift that spend by between 6 and 19 per cent next financial year. At the midpoint that adds an eighth to the hours side and nothing to the other. Forty-seven per cent buy more tools than they build, so it mostly buys more licences into the same process.
The Strongest Case For Spending More Anyway
Seventy-five per cent report efficiency or productivity benefits, up from 66 per cent, and 27 per cent report revenue gains, up from 20 in January. Both moved the right way inside ten months, and a self-reported return is a judgement, not an audited figure.
Fair. It does not rescue the 35 per cent, because that number is self-reported on the same scale, by the same people, in the same survey. They are not confused about whether it worked.
Related reading
What I Would Do Before The New Financial Year
Stop counting tools. Take the three processes that eat the most hours in your business and ask which of them last year’s AI changed the shape of. Not touched. Changed.
If the answer is none, the next spend is not a licence. It is a person who can run the thing, and you can sign up and put one role through it before the tools budget renews. Or lift the spend 12 per cent and ask again next November.
So argue with me: how deeply has AI reached into any Australian business you know, past the department that bought it?
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