Insights

ABS says 12% use AI. Others say 66%

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released its Characteristics of Australian Business 2024-25 report in June. One number stood out: 12 per cent of Australian businesses indicated they used artificial intelligence during the financial year. Up from 1 per cent in 2021-22.

Then Deloitte Access Economics published a figure of two-thirds. Intuit came in at 69 per cent.

The ABS number and the consulting numbers cannot all be right. Someone is measuring something different.

ABS asked businesses whether they used AI as one option from a list of information and communication technologies. The question was binary - yes or no. It covered the full financial year. It surveyed employing businesses across all industries and sizes, weighted to represent the national economy.

Deloitte and Intuit surveyed their own client bases or opted-in panels. Their questions likely asked whether businesses used any tool that included AI features - spellcheck with a language model, accounting software with automated categorisation, a CRM with predictive lead scoring. If you count “any tool that uses AI somewhere in its stack,” two-thirds is plausible. If you count “the business deliberately deployed AI for a specific task,” you get closer to the ABS figure.

Neither measurement is wrong. They are measuring different things.

ABS data tells you something more useful than the headline number. Twelve per cent overall, but the breakdown by business type matters. Innovation-active small businesses - those that introduced a new product, service, or process - reported 19 per cent AI adoption. Non-innovation-active small businesses sat at 4 per cent. Medium businesses hit 28 per cent. Large businesses reached 37 per cent.

The pattern is clear. Businesses that already experiment with new tools adopt AI faster. Businesses that do not innovate at all are barely touching it.

Industry breakdown is sharper. Information, Media and Telecommunications leads at 38 per cent, up from 8 per cent two years ago. Professional services and financial services sit at 24 per cent. Construction is at 6 per cent. Transport, Postal and Warehousing: 1 per cent.

ABS also asked what stopped businesses from using ICT more broadly. The top answer was insufficient staff skills and capabilities at 16 per cent. Second was uncertainty about costs and benefits at 13 per cent. These are the same barriers the MYOB Accounting Industry Monitor found in July, where 49 per cent of firms said they could not figure out how to apply AI in a practical way.

That measurement gap matters because it shapes how businesses and government respond. If you believe two-thirds of businesses already use AI, the conversation is about optimisation and regulation. If you believe 12 per cent use it deliberately, the conversation is about implementation and awareness.

For most Australian SMEs, the honest answer is probably somewhere in the middle. They use tools that have AI features baked in, but they have not gone looking for AI to solve a specific business problem. The accounting software categorises some transactions automatically. The email provider filters spam with a model. That is not the same as sitting down and deciding to automate invoice processing or customer follow-ups.

Businesses getting real returns from AI are the ones that treated it as an implementation problem, not a technology purchase. They identified a repetitive task, scoped the data flow, built or configured a pipeline, and measured the result. The ABS innovation-active category captures this reasonably well: businesses that experiment with new processes adopt AI at five times the rate of businesses that do not.

The number to watch is not 12 per cent or 66 per cent. It is the gap between innovation-active and non-innovation-active businesses. Closing that gap is an implementation challenge, not a marketing one.

Sources

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Characteristics of Australian Business, 2024-25,” released 25 June 2026. abs.gov.au
  • Accountants Daily, “AI, automation use may add nearly $5bn to accounting industry,” Matthew Taylor, 30 July 2026. accountantsdaily.com.au
  • iTWire, “11% or two-thirds? Australia can’t agree how many small businesses use AI,” 11 August 2026. (Referenced via Bing News; article URL currently unavailable)