Exclusive: Adobe finds Australian brands lag behind when it comes to AI
Australian brands are overwhelmingly lagging behind their marketing talent when it comes to the adoption of generative AI, according to new research from Adobe.
The research, which was conducted in partnership with Advanis in May, found that only 31% of Australian brands had adopted the technology at an organisational level, despite 68% of employees having used generative AI for marketing campaigns.
Katrina Troughton, Adobe ANZ vice president and managing director
The trends appears to be incongruent with the simultaneous finding that, in the face of reduced marketing and customer experience budgets, 65% of brands are seeking to drive efficiencies by deploying technology solutions that improve workflows, including through generative AI (45%).
Speaking to Mumbrella, Adobe’s ANZ vice president and managing director Katrina Troughton, attributed the delayed organisational rollout of AI to a need to mitigate risk.
“When either you’re adopting new technology and new tools, you need to be thoughtful about what you’re doing and where it applies,” she said.
While she was glad that brands were taking the time to get AI implementation right, she also underlined that companies may be left open to unchecked AI usage or shadow AI solutions in the absence of official protocol and policy, which can safeguard brands and their clients from ethical risks.
With 31% of ANZ consumers concerned about the ethical implications of AI, Troughton pointed to four key areas that needed to be addressed if companies are to be vigilant about AI use.
“The first is bias,” she said. “Make sure that your outputs aren’t bias, whether it’s culture, gender or language.”
Intellectual property (IP) and copyright was another key concern. With publicly accessible generative AI models understood to digest all user inputs, there is a genuine risk of infringing copyright, or, on the other hand, leaking IP or confidential data.
Third, she said, was brand. “Ensuring that you’ve got alignment with your brand guidelines and an ability to manage that is really important.”
Finally, brands will need to align AI use with their business values and standards. “Consider the broader legal requirements you might have in your industry, and make sure you’re really aligning to all those things,” said Troughton.
Getting all of this right, she said, will be critical to maintaining consumer trust.
“I think that’s another important piece you need to be thinking about. ‘Is everything I’m doing here going to be maintaining trust and transparency with my consumers and my customers?'”
Unsurprisingly, the research revealed that 38% of ANZ customers were more likely to stay loyal to brands they trust, and 29% are more likely to spend more with the brands they trust.
Here, the importance of data safety cannot be ignored, with 89% of consumers indicating they would decrease spending with brands that fail to keep data safe, and 50% refusing to spend at all.
However, brands in ANZ aren’t taking this seriously enough, with 49% indicating that data safety was not considered important to attracting and retaining customers. A series of major data breaches by the likes of Optus and Medibank in the last two years would seem to support these findings.
But despite this, Troughton is largely optimistic about where the ANZ industry is headed when it comes to building trust around the use of AI.
“Here in ANZ, we we are a little bit behind in terms of comparisons to international markets,” she said. “The fact that we’re now seeing more employees using it is I think a great opportunity.”
Ultimately, she said, it was a good thing “brands are taking time to think about making sure it’s right”, and a sign that consumer trust was being prioritised.
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