Artificial intelligence is poised to make a genuine improvement in productivity for Australian businesses but the real benefits won't be unlocked without careful data management, one expert says.
Teresa Tung, senior managing director at global information tech giant Accenture, who is in Sydney from the US to meet with local business leaders, has told AAP companies are already adopting out-of-the-box AI solutions such as Microsoft's Copilot.
"You combine something and the model is already pre-integrated, and it's going to take whatever data you apply to it or sometimes you can start with no data and get going," she explained.
"That's going to be a productivity uplift."
But more strategic uses of AI involve algorithms that know its users' business inside and out, Ms Tung said.
For example, one use for AI is writing computer code and there are a lot of good open-source models for doing so.
"But if I ever want something specific to my business, my people, my products, my processes, I'm going to need my data around it," she said.
Large language model chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude that have captivated the public were trained mostly on public data taken from the internet, she noted.
"So, your data becomes a new source of competitive advantage because you can see in your business, unique states where you have a vantage point that nobody else has because that's where your expertise is.
"That's where your work resides, where you have unique signals."
Many workplaces have their business data scattered across emails, Excel spreadsheets and perhaps even on paper.
"This is not really good quality data," Ms Tung said.
Managing that information and putting it in a form that AI algorithms can access will be just as important as supply chain management for businesses in the future, she predicted.
