How to grow your AI strategy smartly in 2025
Here are three changes you can make to your AI strategy today to really hit the ground running in 2025.
Authored by Adrian Towsey, Area Vice President, Salesforce leading the Emerging, Small & Medium Business segments across Australia & New Zealand.
A new year has arrived and with it, a renewed sense of optimism about the future of business in Australia, driven by — you guessed it — artificial intelligence. The most recent Salesforce Small & Medium Business Trends Report found that 81% of global Emerging small business (ESMB) leaders who use AI are optimistic about their businesses future, while 93% say they are operating more efficiently because of AI.
The use of AI by businesses isn’t a ‘future’ possibility — it’s the here-and-now reality, with brands already using human employees alongside agents to have a workforce without limits, managing everything from initial customer queries to personalised recommendations, stepping up to provide an on-demand, almost limitless workforce that is helping businesses scale smarter. A new type of software, these autonomous agents work across the data of a business to formulate and execute plans, performing work in partnership with employees to drive greater impact.
The adoption curve beyond predictive and generative AI is only getting steeper, and savvy business leaders are investing to power their growth; up to 78% of Australia’s growing ESMBs are going to increase their investment in AI, compared to just 55% of their declining peers .
Clearly, there needs to be some adaptation to AI strategies to respond to the rise of agents; humans and agents will drive customer service as they work together, so maximiszing the use of this new, unlimited workforce needs to be implemented thoughtfully.
So here are three changes you can make to your AI strategy today to really hit the ground running in 2025.
Rethink your customer experience
The old saying goes that the customer is always right in matters of taste, but it still falls on business owners and frontline employees to provide a seamless, helpful, and high-impact experience to the customer as part of their shopping journey. So, how can you use AI agents to meet these expectations and adapt your existing customer strategies in the process?
For telecommunications service provider Kudosity, agents are helping to provide a helpful and engaging first line of response to prospective customers on their website and in a similar vein, hospitality group Norths Collective are using agents to provide a 24/7 responsive customer service.
But agents don’t just have to be public-facing to have a positive impact on the customer experience. Premium flexible accommodation provider Urban Rest sees a future where its guest relations team can use their own internal agent to help shape responses to queries, while health technology company Magentus can see a role for agents in assisting with product migrations.
Businesses can benefit from the digital assistance that agents provide alongside employees, to help ease workload and support growth. It can help manage seasonal challenges or address staffing gaps, enabling employees to focus on more valuable tasks, which will improve the customer experience.
Focus on the data
While AI agents are recognised for their ability to reason and act within the guardrails set by a business, they can only be as successful as the data they have access to. The good news is Australian business leaders are a wise lot, with 79% — higher than the global average — saying that improving data quality increases revenue.
Having good data quality means being able to combine customer data from across the business, even if it was previously inaccessible or not centralised. By unifying this data, you can improve AI, insights, and automations, leading to a consistent customer experience across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
Make time for tech
Ultimately, you won’t know what AI innovations will work for your business unless you do the simple thing and give it a try. Australian business leaders are clearly aware that AI is evolving rapidly; 47% are worried about being left behind on AI, and 73% say keeping pace with the rate of change is challenging.
But it doesn’t have to be a difficult process. Find the opportunities to give your customer-facing teams the chance to test, experiment and share the use cases that would help them in their day-to-day. Setting up an agent in Agentforce is all about clicks, not code, as you don’t need to be a developer to get started in building, customising and innovating with agents fast. By getting hands on, getting practical experience, you’re going to find the opportunities and also identify the blindspots.
Don’t be left behind
The reality is simple. To be considered a growth business in 2025, business leaders need to be all in on AI. Those that do will continue to see results; last year, 88% of local ESMB leaders said AI has boosted their revenue. To push this number even higher, and take advantage of the benefits that human employees working alongside an unlimited labour force of digital workers provide, Australian business leaders need to move quickly to provide assistance to their overwhelmed teams.
Read now: Australian SMBs drawing renewed confidence from AI evolution
