Australian SMBs drawing renewed confidence from AI evolution

Authored by Adrian Towsey, Area Vice President, Salesforce leading the Emerging, Small & Medium Business segments across Australia & New Zealand.

It’s not always easy being a small business leader in Australia. From an uncertain regulatory environment to challenging economic conditions and frustrated customers, there’s a lot to juggle while delivering an exceptional product.

If there is one thing our leaders agree on, it’s the positive impact AI is having on their businesses, and the optimism that this provides heading into a new year as autonomous agents reshape how work gets done, delivering significant cost savings and boosting productivity.

That’s according to the latest global Salesforce Small and Medium Business Trends Report, that surveyed thousands of SMB leaders from around the world about their use of AI, their attitudes toward its evolution and implementation, and the impact it’s having on their business.

The AI impact

According to Australian SMB leaders, 85% are using or experimenting with AI in their business every day – compared to a global average of 75% – and of those, 88% say it’s increasing their revenue.  Generating new content, automating service chatbots, and driving automated recommendations for customers were the three main uses for AI our local business leaders found to be the most effective. 

These types of use cases make a lot of sense. Small business leaders are looking for practical ways to implement AI into their flow of work, as they build momentum with their teams to use the technology to deliver positive results for customer service. We’re already seeing how AI is helping SMBs ‌craft compelling and personalised copy for their customer outreach, or summarise enquiries to ensure consistency in responses.  And autonomous agents are already helping customer-facing workers manage queries effectively, simply by being grounded in the trusted data of an organisation, able to handle everything from return queries, inventory management, recommendations, and more.

This research highlights just how important it is to invest in new technology – whether it’s predicative AI, generative AI or autonomous AI agents – that will be easy to integrate into existing tech platforms, and yet still provide a personalised, responsive experience for their customers.

Bringing AI to life

One local SMB success story that is already seeing a positive impact from its use of AI is Urban Rest, a premium flexible accommodation provider that provides superior options for longer-term travelers. As they’ve scaled across Australia and internationally, the business has put premium customer service front and centre, with a focus on developing an integrated, 360-degree view of their guests and properties.

As a global accommodation business, Urban Rest has reservations and guest relations specialists available to support guests 24/7. By using AI, the guest relations team can learn every property like the back of their hand, even if they’ve never visited the site. It has also meant that customer-facing roles can work faster by surfacing the right property information based on the guests they are serving, automatically generating case summaries in the process. All innovations that are foundational for running a digital-first business.

The results speak for themselves. The business has seen a 1,400% increase in revenue in under three years, while being able to increase ‌productivity for its operations team by 50%. Its use of AI has meant not only has the business been able to remove the physical reception desks out of properties, but it expects to reduce the number of service call-outs it makes by up to 40%. 

A boost to business confidence

Urban Rest has shown how local SMBs can succeed with AI. By taking a deliberate approach to unifying data and improving its integration across systems, local SMBs can put themselves on a path to AI success. This isn’t a surprise, as Australian business leaders are already more data conscious than their global peers—79% said that if they improved the quality of their data, their revenue would increase. 

Once that good data foundation is in place, leaders need to ensure they have a considered AI strategy in place, one that targets specific outcomes that will be achieved with AI and how this will work alongside the existing workforce. 

The overwhelming majority of SMB leaders are optimistic about the future of their business, even if some leaders remain concerned that they might be left behind on AI. But Australian business leaders are already ahead of the curve for AI use, and should take confidence in the fact they are in a good position to seize on the momentum of AI and autonomous agents and deliver great results. 

Read now: Why AI Agents can be a path to better, more trusted customer experiences in 2025