Insights on AI automation, operational efficiency, and digital transformation for mid-sized organisations.
The sales story doing the rounds this week is Snowflake's cold outbound. Everyone's quoting the reply rate. The useful part is the bit you can actually copy: they wouldn't let the AI send its own emails.
AWS has put a billion dollars into embedding its own engineers inside customer businesses, following OpenAI and Anthropic. When the people who build the models spend that kind of money on people, it tells you where the hard part really is.
A survey of 81,000 AI users found the productivity gains are real. It also found only about one in ten said the benefit reached their employer. Why the value leaks out before it gets to the business, and what it takes to keep it.
Onboarding is mostly an information problem dressed up as a people problem. The knowledge exists, it is just scattered, and that is exactly the kind of thing an AI assistant on your own material can fix.
Putting someone's name in a subject line isn't personal, it's just a variable. Real personalisation means the message would make no sense sent to anyone else, and that takes knowing something, not just merging something.
Most AI training transfers knowledge in a single session, then expects behaviour to change on its own. It rarely does. Capability is a habit built through repetition on real work, not enthusiasm in a room.
Oracle shed about 21,000 roles this year and named AI in the filing. If you run a mid-market business, copying that logic is the mistake. Your AI dividend is not a smaller payroll, it is the same people reaching work they could never get to.
AI doesn't struggle with the task. It struggles with the parts of the task you have never had to write down. Articulating the process is the hard part, and it is worth doing even if you never automate.
From 10 December, Australian privacy law will require you to disclose where automated decision-making touches the people you deal with. Writing the paragraph is the easy part. Being able to answer the question behind it is the real work.
The fastest support team is still slower than not needing to contact support. Most repeat tickets are a comms gap, not a support gap, and that gap is what automation should close, upstream of the queue.
Deals rarely die in the meeting. They die in the follow-up that never happened because the rep was busy. That gap is an admin problem AI is well suited to close, without replacing the relationship.
Most support teams answer every ticket and add up none of them. The thing that would tell you what to actually fix is already sitting in the tickets you closed and forgot.
Gartner reckons Australian organisations will spend A$172.3bn on IT this year, and that more than 40% of agentic-AI projects will be scrapped by 2027. What actually kills the ones that die isn't the technology.
A login is the easiest thing to count and the least useful. Real adoption is someone reaching for AI on a Tuesday because it is genuinely the faster way to do the job, which is a smaller and far more honest number.
In most mid-market finance teams, the bottleneck in accounts payable isn't the payment run. It's the chasing. Where AI genuinely helps, and where a person still has to sign.
When a new capability lands, everyone asks what they can automate. The sharper first question is what they can stop doing. Automating work that should not exist just makes the waste cheap, permanent and invisible.
A venture firm says Australia has a two-year window to build AI champions. The part that matters for mid-market operators is that the advantage it describes is one you already own.
Most AI policies fail because they are too long to read. A usable one fits on a page and answers four plain questions your team can actually hold in their head.
Most of hiring is admin, not assessment. The smart move is to let AI carry the volume (job descriptions, acknowledgements, summaries) while people keep every decision that affects whether someone gets the job.
Most mid-sized firms have already bought the AI tools. Adoption stalls because no one has shown people what good use looks like in their role, or made it clear they're allowed to use it.
PwC Australia just reported average partner income of $814,000. Up 6% on last year. Despite profits falling 2%. How? Fewer people. More AI. 35% fewer partners...
I had a great time on Media Tech Talk last week with Steve Jones, ▫️Daevid Richards and Paul Luckett. We got into something I've been seeing play out in real...
This was on ABC 7.30 Monday evening 30/03/26. Shaon D. — software engineer, former Meta, now running his own AI-powered start-up with zero human employees —...
The question I get often: "Where do we even start?" My honest answer is: start with the workflow that's slowing everything else down. Not the most interesting...
Every use case I've posted this week comes back to the same idea: A human was doing something predictable and rule-based. AI now does it faster, more...
Most sales reps finish a call and spend 25 minutes doing admin. Update the CRM. Write the follow-up email. Summarise the meeting for the team. Log the next...
Here's something I observed across 25 years working in start-ups and the tech and marketing industry: Most businesses treat every inbound lead exactly the...
Month-end close is the workflow that makes finance teams quietly dread the calendar. Chasing outstanding invoices. Reconciling across three systems. Compiling...
Most mid-sized businesses using AI right now have no policy governing how it's used. No rules on what data staff can put into it. No guidance on when human...
Claude is how we run our business. I'm in it extensively throughout the day. And I still can't keep up with what they're shipping. This week: Dispatch. Credit...
Phone support might be the highest-cost, lowest-leverage activity in most mid-sized businesses. Staff tied up answering the same 15 questions they answered...
Most leadership teams start the day already behind. First hour is spent piecing together what happened yesterday — customer issues, operational exceptions,...
Atlassian just cut 1,600 jobs. 10% of their global workforce. 480 Australians. Gone. I feel for everyone of them. Cannon-Brookes sent a company-wide email....
Most marketing teams find out a competitor changed their positioning when a prospect mentions it in a sales call. I know that feeling. By then it's too late to...
I spent 25 years in start-ups and the tech and marketing industry. So believe me when I say this: Your sales reps are spending 40% of their time on work that...
WiseTech's CEO said something last week that I want mid-market operators to think about: "Apps that do one thing and do that thing reasonably well — products...
When I talk about AI making businesses operate faster, I don't mean people work harder. I mean the process itself runs at system speed instead of human speed....
Something happened this week that I need to write about. Not a client result. Not a case study. My own work. I've been using Claude Cowork — Anthropic's...
300+ emails a day landing in one inbox. Client emails. Compliance queries. Trade confirmations. Account updates. Complaint escalations. All mixed together....
Let me paint you a picture you might recognise. Your finance team is opening invoices, keying in data, matching against purchase orders, chasing approvals, and...
Something I noticed after spending a year deep in AI and automation: Most companies are still treating AI like a fancy tool. A plugin. A shortcut. Something...
The Australian Financial Review said it plainly this week: “And the threat of big job losses is very real.” They even captured it in a single caption: “Richard...
After 25 years inside high-growth tech, Mick O'Brien built Agentive Group to give mid-sized businesses access to enterprise-grade AI automation — without the enterprise price tag. Not demos. Not experiments. Systems that actually ship.