The year that was – a breakthrough year for generative AI. Australian organisations that have already embedded AI capabilities were the first to explore its potential, and those seeing the most value are already outpacing others in their adoption journey. 

Fast forward to 2024, AI supercharged with automation is going to create new value for organisations everywhere. 

So, what’s in store for us? 

AI and automation use cases are the sweet spot.  
At a time when the explosive growth of AI has created a business imperative for executives to act, many are still finding it difficult to cut through all the buzz. They are grappling with a number of challenges – from being overwhelmed with potential use cases that can quickly generate value to developing and implementing an AI strategy. 

The good news is there are several AI and automation opportunities that hit that sweet spot, so we expect to see Australian organisations leveraging these use cases. 

An example of this is intelligent document processing (IDP). In industries that are flooded by documents – think financial services, government, healthcare and legal – IDP can add value in improving operations through speed, capacity, and cost efficiencies.  

Blending AI with automation can also do wonders for Australian organisations wanting to understand and act on emails, texts, and unstructured data. This approach is suitable for the telecommunications industry, for example, where inquiries need to be categorised and routed to the right customer service desk.  

There’s a new jolt of automating automation itself.  
Ironically, automation has historically required a considerable amount of manual work to make it work. With the rise of “hands-free” enhancements in automation, we expect a shift to happen in the coming year. 
 
No-code capabilities and the rise in citizen development will see developers and business users seamlessly convert natural language into automation for workflows, test cases, process mining, and individual tasks. Meanwhile, thanks to generative AI and new analytic techniques, much of the laborious tasks associated with model training, such as reading documents and extracting, compiling, and entering data, can be streamlined with automation. 
 
Safe AI will be a priority for action and innovation.  
AI governance has been a hot topic in Australia, with the government being pushed to take a lead role in regulating the technology whilst enabling innovation and ensuring it is used ethically and responsibly. This conversation will continue in 2024 as the market seeks to mitigate the potential for misuse and miscalculation in the use of the technology. 

We will see more Australian organisations partner with technology providers to launch AI advances across their human-in-the-loop capabilities in recognition of the critical importance of human review of machine output. 

In many ways, we are today at a pivotal point with AI and automation. The potential changes are so immense and exciting that we can only catch a glimpse of what might be and what is possible – in the near term and over time.