Displaying items by tag: Productivity

Executive employment in Australia fell a further 3 per cent in February to its lowest point in the past five years.

Next generation messaging platform startup for businesses 8seats has raised A$2 million in seed funding from a consortium of investors including Black Nova, former Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci, and tech entrepreneurs Mike Priddis and Greg Miller, with the funding to enable the homegrown startup to scale its platform and accelerate its go-to-market strategy in preparation for a public launch in 2025, following a successful early-access rollout.

COMPANY NEWS:  ProHance, a leading operational analytics and workforce productivity platform, has unveiled its Global Productivity Benchmarking Report. Covering 2023 and Q1 to Q3 of 2024, the report delivers deep, data-backed insights on workforce productivity trends across industries.

GUEST OPINION: New South Wales has legislated ambitious climate targets to reach net zero by 2050, with interim goals to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and 70 per cent by 2035. However, based on current policy settings, New South Wales is projected to miss all of these targets—2030, 2035, and 2050.

Boomi helps Australian customer-owned bank speed loans and credit card processing, and enhance customer understanding with an automated data framework

Intelligent integration and automation company Boomi today announced that Beyond Bank used the Boomi Enterprise Platform to automate its loan origination capabilities, speeding lending delivery with deeper insights into its members and eliminating 14 days of internal processing.

SafetyCulture report reveals critical gaps in frontline workforce management

GUEST RESEARCH  ProHance, a new-age workplace analytics and operations enablement platform, today released the results of its latest Global Productivity Benchmarking Report.

GUEST RESEARCH: New Salesforce research reveals generative AI is among the top three business priorities for 81 per cent of Australian C-suite executives.

According to the Salesforce report nearly 300 leaders from large businesses across the country, 50 per cent said their organisation currently had a clear and defined generative AI strategy, while a further 42 per cent said they had started working on a generative AI strategy for their business.

Why it matters: Today, every company wants to be an AI company.

Research suggests, companies that haven’t already implemented AI risk losing significant ground to competitors, and this could happen more quickly than anticipated, as we move from chatbots to copilots to autonomous AI agents. This next great leap forward will feature agentic systems, which can be thought of as trusted digital colleagues as opposed to digital assistants.

C-suite executives said the key motivations driving generative AI adoption were:

• Enhanced productivity (43%)
• Innovative customer and employee experiences (42%)
• Obtaining a competitive edge in a dynamic market (41%).

Go deeper: Aussie C-suite executives are bullish on generative AI integration and are taking decisive action to ensure its success. The CEO is seen as being the most responsible for ensuring generative AI is successfully integrated (40%) and teams enabled, followed by the CIO/CTO (29%), and department heads (17%).

When asked where generative AI would have the biggest positive business impact, C-suite executives identified information technology (41%), operations (35%), customer service (31%) and marketing (29%).

Despite being widely used, however, over 92 per cent of C-suite executives said they believed there were still barriers to adoption of generative AI in their business today. Data factors were high on the list of barriers, including:

• Accessibility and inclusivity (31%)
• Generative AI producing inaccurate outputs (31%)
• The use of incomplete customer/company data to train AI models (30%)
• Lack of data privacy and security (28%)
• The use of out-of-date public data to train generative AI models (25%).

Customer perspective: “One of the reasons we recently expanded our agreement with Salesforce to include Einstein 1 was to use it to unlock the potential of generative AI across our business. But we wanted to do it in a deliberate way, so it's easy to build, grow and evolve as the business does,” said Jeremy Burton, CTO, hipages Group. “With Einstein’s generative AI, we’re excited about how it will help us create a better experience for our contact centre team, especially with how they engage the most important stakeholders on our platform: our tradies.
“If we can create a better experience for these customer-facing teams, we’ll be creating real value for our business with improved efficiency across these functions.”

The Salesforce perspective: The race is on to embrace generative AI and do it well, and that is nowhere more clearly felt than among business leaders.

That’s why we’re delivering the generative AI that gives customers the higher productivity, value customer relationships and margins they expect. Innovations include Einstein Service Agent and Einstein Sales Agents, built on the Einstein 1 Platform and powered by Data Cloud.

Customers need the confidence that their data is secure and trustworthy. That’s why we developed the Einstein Trust Layer which lets customers get the benefit of generative AI without compromising their data security and privacy controls.

“I’ve seen firsthand the pressure CEOs and other leaders are under to get this right, and quickly, to both deliver measurable value and remain competitive. We’ve made significant progress in a short time, but we’re still just scratching the surface when it comes to how generative AI can unlock the trapped value in many businesses,” said Frank Fillmann, General Manager ANZ, Salesforce.

“This is why we are laser focused on being trusted AI advisors to our customers, helping them with the roadmap to responsible innovation to support their customers and employees. Every AI conversation is a ROI conversation as we help more Australian businesses augment their teams with AI to improve productivity and accelerate growth.”

Methodology: Salesforce commissioned YouGov to conduct a double-anonymous online survey of C-suite leaders of large businesses in Australia. The research was conducted from 16th-23rd July 2024 and yielded responses from 288 C-suite executives across a variety of departments at companies with 250 or more employees.

GUEST OPINION: Employees work better when they are satisfied with their jobs and their company's working conditions. Job satisfaction increases workplace productivity, which can generate more revenue and make a company more profitable. However, employers and business owners are mostly responsible for creating a psychologically safe and stress-free workplace.

GUEST OPINION:  The rise of intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) powered by Generative AI (GenAI) promises a significant evolution in the field of customer relationship management and contact centres. The technology promises to improve both the efficiency of agents and the quality of service they can deliver.

COMPANY NEWS:  ProHance, a new age workplace analytics and operations enablement platform has been recognised as an Enterprise High Performer in G2's Summer 2024 report on Workforce Management for the Asia Pacific region.

By James Robinson, Head of Services for Asia Pacific, SYSPRO: The skilled labour shortage in the Australian manufacturing and distribution sectors is a widely reported and urgent issue that is causing significant and far-reaching effects.

GUEST OPINION:  For developers, AI coding tools are the flavour of the month, and their use can assist improve productivity, but only if utilised safely.

New Dell AI PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus bring exceptional performance, groundbreaking battery life and AI experiences

COMPANY NEWS: New Dell AI PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus bring exceptional performance, groundbreaking battery life and AI experiences.

● It now takes 35 days for new hires to become fully productive in their role, up from 24 days in 2023
● Improving productivity is a top priority for Australian businesses in 2024
● But lack of employee engagement is the top barrier holding productivity back

Australian businesses are struggling to hold onto their new recruits with one in eight (13%) leaving during the probation period.

Google launches new course to help put Australians on fast track to AI skills and jobs

GUEST OPINION:  It is welcome news that Australian businesses will be able to contribute their recommendations on the future of AI in this country.

WesTrac, one of the world’s largest authorised Caterpillar equipment dealers, has successfully implemented a Dematic automated piece picking system for industrial supplies solution, transforming operations and enhancing efficiency and productivity at its Tomago warehouse in New South Wales.

GUEST OPINION:  The home office takes centre stage as the traditional office fades into the background of our daily lives. However, combining work productivity with home comfort can be challenging. How do you create a space in your home that sparks productivity and inspiration?

GUEST OPINION:  Most businesses today are awash with technology and it’s foolish to add more to the mix before you’ve analysed and optimised your existing stack.