A vast majority of Australian and New Zealand business leaders believe automation is a critical first step before applying AI to business processes if AI strategies are to succeed. While there was slight variance on either side of the Tasman Sea, 82 per cent of Australian and 78 per cent of New Zealand respondents said automation was fundamental to ensuring AI success.

These findings are from the AI ‘UNLESS’ Report: From Hype to ROI, a study* commissioned by Nintex, a global leader in Agentic Business Orchestration, which surveyed more than 700 finance and IT executives across six countries. The A/NZ findings reveal that while almost all local organisations have begun using AI technologies, automation used in conjunction with AI was the common factor underpinning AI projects which delivered the strongest business results.

“AI and automation together are greater than the sum of their parts. AI alone can create individual productivity gains, but it takes automation to make it scalable, governable, and a true value driver,” said Keith Payne, Regional Vice President, APAC at Nintex. “Automation and process orchestration can help solve some of the hardest parts of an organisation’s AI journey, from enforcing data governance rules, mandating human oversight at critical junctures, and creating audit trails to ensure every decision, input, and output is tracked and transparent.”

When asked which outcomes had been made stronger when using automation and AI together, Australian respondents most commonly reported efficiency gains (54.33 per cent), innovation capabilities (51.18 per cent) and quality improvements (48.82 per cent). While there were similarities with the results from New Zealand respondents, with quality improvements (52.05 per cent) and efficiency gains (47.95 per cent) the most commonly reported outcomes, risk management and governance (46.58 per cent) was a key upshot of combining automation and AI in Aotearoa.

One Australian organisation laying its data and process foundations before broader AI implementation is the University of Sydney.

“We’ve been using automation to ensure there are clear and consistent process pathways for our people to follow, and to ensure our resulting data is clean,” Deborah Hook, Director Legal Operations, University of Sydney said. “Using automation has been a key first step for us. It means we’re then implementing AI on quality processes and trusted data foundations – which elevates us from AI as a personal productivity tool, to AI for end-to-end workflow transformation.”[HF1]

Across both Australia (99 per cent) and New Zealand (96 per cent), almost all organisations had begun using AI within their businesses. Of those who had not begun doing so, the technical skills gap was the primary reason for Australian organisations, while ethical concerns, budget constraints, and difficulty integrating with legacy systems were reported as obstacles in New Zealand.

“For many organisations, the major challenge they encounter when launching and scaling AI pilots is a lack of systemic control over how data flows through their systems, how decisions are made, and how sensitive information stays secure,” Payne said. “Automation is a foil to these challenges. As we’ve found through the research, automation reduces the risk of data quality issues and governance failure – some of the most common barriers to AI success – and sets organisations up to unlock the full potential of AI.”

To learn more about how organisations are unlocking business value from AI, read the full 2025 AI UNLESS Report: From Hype to ROI here: https://www.nintex.com/blog/ai-unless-report-why-automation-must-come-first/

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