CPA Australia's 2026 Business Technology Report landed on 9 October with a finding that should concern every business owner in the country: 88 per cent of Australian businesses now use AI, but only 10 per cent have deeply embedded it across their operations. Of the five markets surveyed — Australia, Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore — Australia ranked dead last on deep integration.
The same day, CPA Australia's Business and Investment Lead Gavan Ord presented the findings to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, warning that "Australia risks falling behind regional competitors unless businesses are supported to integrate AI more deeply into their operations."
The adoption illusion
The headline adoption number — 88 per cent — sounds impressive. But the survey of 1,679 accounting and finance professionals across five markets reveals that most of that usage is shallow. A further 43 per cent of Australian businesses reported that AI is used in several areas but has not been deeply integrated into operations. In CPA Australia's framing, these organisations remain stuck in an "experimentation phase."
The distinction matters because CPA Australia found a direct link between deep integration and profitability: 63 per cent of businesses with broader AI integration reported increased profitability. Experimentation, on its own, is unlikely to deliver those gains.
"Successful businesses across the region are increasingly integrating AI into core operations, while many Australian organisations remain in the early stages of that journey," Ord said. "If Australia is serious about lifting productivity and competitiveness, businesses need to move beyond using AI for basic, ad-hoc tasks — such as drafting emails — and focus on embedding it more deeply into their operations."
The agentic AI divide
The most striking gap is in agentic AI — systems capable of completing multi-step tasks with minimal human prompting. Just 28 per cent of Australian businesses reported using agentic AI, compared with 58 per cent in the Chinese Mainland, 49 per cent in Hong Kong, and 47 per cent in Singapore. Custom-built AI tools showed a similar gap: 36 per cent in Australia versus 61 per cent in China.
These aren't small differences. Chinese businesses are more than twice as likely to be running AI agents that handle complex, multi-step workflows autonomously. That's the difference between a business where AI drafts an email and one where AI qualifies a lead, schedules a meeting, and updates the CRM without a human touching it.
At Heygentic, we've seen this pattern firsthand. The businesses getting real value from AI aren't the ones with the most subscriptions — they're the ones that have redesigned specific workflows around what AI can actually do.
A governance gap compounds the problem
CPA Australia also flagged a governance deficit: nearly three in ten organisations provide little or no guidance or oversight of AI use. That's a problem on both sides. Without governance, businesses can't manage risk — and without risk management, leadership teams are reluctant to give AI more responsibility.
"Many organisations have adopted AI faster than they have developed the governance frameworks needed to manage it effectively," Ord added. "Strong governance is essential to managing risk, building trust and ensuring businesses realise the long-term value of their AI investments."
This mirrors what we covered earlier this year when Australia's own governance-first approach was found to be costing productivity. The irony is that many businesses have neither governance nor integration — they have AI tools scattered across the organisation with no framework for either scaling them or controlling them.
Deloitte tells the same story from a different angle
CPA Australia's findings don't exist in isolation. Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, surveying 3,235 business and technology leaders across 24 countries, found that only 12 per cent of Australian leaders say generative AI is already transforming their business or industry — half the global average of 25 per cent.
Investment intent is also lagging: just 65 per cent of Australian organisations plan to increase AI spending next financial year, compared with 84 per cent globally.
"Australian organisations are making strides in AI adoption, but the data shows they are still trailing global peers when it comes to genuine transformation," said Stuart Scotis, National Leader for Technology, Innovation and GenAI at Deloitte Australia. "To close this gap, leaders need to move beyond incremental improvements and single use cases, and rethink how work is done."
Two major professional bodies, surveying different populations with different methodologies, arriving at the same conclusion: Australian businesses are using AI everywhere and integrating it almost nowhere.
What this means for your business
If you're a business owner reading this and thinking "we use ChatGPT, we use Copilot, we're fine" — this report is specifically about you. CPA Australia's data shows that AI tool adoption is no longer a differentiator. Almost everyone has the tools. The gap is in what you do with them.
CPA Australia's submission to the parliamentary committee put it plainly: "Policymakers should therefore avoid treating AI adoption rates as a measure of success. High adoption does not necessarily translate into higher productivity."
The same applies to business owners. The question is no longer "are you using AI?" but "have you changed how your business operates because of it?"
Practically, that means picking two or three workflows — lead qualification, invoice processing, customer onboarding — and actually rebuilding them around AI, not bolting a chatbot onto the side. It means creating governance policies so your team knows what AI can and can't do. And it means investing in the skills to make integration stick, whether that's leveraging government programs or partnering with specialists.
What to watch
The Joint Select Committee on AI is still taking evidence. CPA Australia is pushing for expanded digital support programs and workforce capability initiatives — essentially arguing that the government should fund integration, not just awareness. That's a meaningful shift from the policy conversation even twelve months ago.
Ord's closing statement to the committee captured the stakes: "The next phase of AI will not be defined by how many businesses use it. It will be defined by how effectively and deeply businesses integrate it into the way they operate, make decisions and create value."
For Australian businesses, the clock is ticking. The 88 per cent adoption rate proves the tools aren't the problem. The 10 per cent integration rate proves most businesses haven't yet done the harder work of actually changing how they operate. That gap is where productivity — and competitive advantage — lives.
Sources
- Aussie businesses risk falling behind in AI race — CPA Australia
- CPA Australia submission to the Joint Select Committee on AI — CPA Australia
- Businesses barely scratching surface of AI potential — Financial Newswire
- Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence: 09/10/2026 — ParlInfo
- Australian organisations lag global peers in realising AI's transformational potential — Deloitte Australia
- The State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 — Deloitte
