Your Business Is Probably Using AI — So Why Isn’t It Paying Off?

This week the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA) warned that the country risks leaving its 2.7 million small businesses behind in the AI race. The warning followed fresh Treasury advice that Australia could miss out on the economic upside of AI if businesses never move past basic experimentation. The numbers tell the story: National AI Centre research cited by COSBOA found 43% of Australian SMEs have adopted AI in some form, but only 14% have worked it into their core operations (Small Business Connections).

That gap between 43% and 14% is the whole game. Plenty of Aussie businesses have someone drafting emails in ChatGPT or summarising meetings with Copilot. Far fewer have AI doing anything that actually shows up on the P&L. COSBOA CEO Skye Cappuccio put her finger on why: owners aren’t short on willingness, they’re short on time and they don’t know where to start.

The payoff gap is usually a process problem, not a tool problem

Here’s the pattern we see across the client environments we look after, from Brookvale on the Northern Beaches to businesses out in Orange and Bathurst: the firms that get nothing from AI have bolted a clever tool onto a messy, undocumented workflow. The tool speeds up one step, the other nine stay broken, and the owner quietly concludes AI is overhyped. The firms that get real value did the boring bit first — they picked one genuinely painful, repetitive task, mapped how it actually runs, and only then pointed AI at it.

AI doesn’t fix a bad process. It just runs it faster.

The same discipline covers the risks. Keep human judgement on anything customer-facing or financial, check the output rather than trusting it, and never paste confidential client or business data into a tool you haven’t vetted. The Federal Government’s Digital Solutions program (topped up by more than $25 million in its latest round) offers practical help, and a parliamentary inquiry is now examining what’s holding SMEs back.