Australia doesn't hate AI. It's just not convinced yet
On the gap between AI hype and AI trust — and how to win over a sceptical business community.
By Andrew Lai · First published by SMB Tech. Republished with permission.
Wednesday 16 July is AI Appreciation Day, an unofficial global moment to reflect on what AI has done well and what it still gets wrong. Most Australians, if the data is to be believed, will not feel particularly appreciative.
In May 2025, KPMG and the University of Melbourne published Trust, Attitudes and Use of AI: A Global Study, surveying 48,000 people across 47 countries. The headline finding for this country was striking: only 30 per cent of Australians believe the benefits of AI outweigh the risks.
That is the lowest level of trust of any country in the survey. The same study found 78 per cent of Australians are actively concerned about negative outcomes from AI, and a Roy Morgan poll in October last year reported that 65 per cent of Australians believe AI creates more problems than it solves.
Those numbers are easy to dismiss as being inconsequential. But anyone trying to introduce AI into their team will understand how much of an impact it makes in the form of constant objections and reluctance. The first question a staff member usually asks is about privacy or data. The second is usually about jobs. The third, often unspoken, is who’s responsibility will it be to spend the extra time managing the implementation and the potential fallout.
It is worth saying clearly that this scepticism is not unreasonable. Australians have spent two years watching corporate AI announcements collide with very public AI failures. We hear Canva celebrate the productivity gains of generative AI on the same week we read about Canva staff cuts. We hear the federal government talk up productivity while a string of headlines warn that AI will replace half the jobs in the country.
The polarised media narrative does not reflect what is actually happening inside most Australian businesses, where the reality is much more boring but practical: a bookkeeper saving ten hours a week, a sales team writing better proposals that end up winning or an administrator automating their way out of a backlog.
Our wariness of authority and our strong worker-protection instincts only sharpen the response. When someone tells an Australian small business owner that a new technology will change everything, the default position is to assume that whatever changes are coming will land on staff before they land on the spreadsheet.
The harder argument, and the one that does not get made nearly enough, is that scepticism without action has a price. Australia’s labour productivity has grown at an average of just 0.66 per cent per year over the five years to 2023-24, according to the Productivity Commission. In the United States, the equivalent figure over a comparable period is around 2.1 per cent. The Productivity Commission described the 2010s as the worst decade for productivity growth in 60 years. The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook now ranks Australia 18th out of 69 economies on productivity, and the Australian Financial Review has been calling the situation a ‘national emergency’ for two years running.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is not waiting. China’s national generative AI adoption rate hit 42.8 per cent in December 2025, up more than 25 percentage points in a year, and AI penetration in Chinese industrial enterprises jumped from under 10 per cent to 47.5 per cent in the same period. While Australian SMEs are understandably asking whether AI is safe, the businesses they compete with internationally are quietly compounding 20 and 30 per cent efficiency gains.
None of this means SMEs should leap into AI without thinking. The mistakes that come from rushing and buying tools without a use case are real and well-documented. But there is a meaningful difference between cautious adoption and no adoption at all.
The risk this country is running is not that it adopts AI too quickly. It is that we hesitate ourselves into irrelevance while the rest of the world keeps moving.
Australian small businesses do not need to fall in love with AI on 16 July. They just need to understand it, test it deliberately and find one place where it genuinely improves the work.
Scepticism about AI is healthy. Sitting it out is not.