MYOB Report: Data & AI Innovation in the ANZ Mid-Market
Over the summer break I had the chance to review the November MYOB Mid Market report for Australia & New Zealand, which surveyed 506 businesses.
It’s a good read. The key insights from this report are: (a) these businesses are generally optimistic about the future, and (b) they are eager to invest in innovation to drive growth.
Both Australian and NZ businesses report they are prioritising data and AI technologies in their top five areas of focus for the next five years.
But what does “prioritising data & AI” really mean?
From my experience working with this segment, I consistently observe the following trends in technology investments:
A strong preference for off-the-shelf solutions that are easy to support.
Modularity is crucial, given the diverse range of software and technologies in use.
While mid-market organizations are more agile than their enterprise counterparts, they often have their own "legacy" software, making integration highly important.
These organizations typically have small IT teams focused on the support of core applications (especially ERP), and therefore prefer short, targeted “expert services” engagements that deliver rapid and substantial value.
With these points in mind, here are some recommendations for mid-market organizations looking to enhance their data and AI capabilities:
My recommendations - for the short term
Boost Specific Functions with AI-Enabled Apps:
Invest in off-the-shelf AI software to enhance specific functions. Generative AI can significantly improve productivity for white-collar and information workers, allowing companies to achieve more with the same resources (and sometimes, with fewer people). Look for apps that can improve your slowest or most costly office functions. For instance:
Microsoft 365 Copilots can expedite document creation, generate email follow-ups from meeting transcripts, and offer numerous other productivity enhancements.
Adobe’s Firefly accelerates the creation of stunning assets by creative teams.
Jummbo shortens the time required to prospect new potential customers.
There is a vast array of AI-generated proposal builders to choose from, and this is just the beginning.
Publish Internal Chatbots
Many mid-market organizations have intranets and document stores filled with valuable information that employees may struggle to find. Creating and publishing internal chatbots has now become very easy, and these chatbots can significantly improve user experience and boost productivity.
It's crucial to ensure that the documents indexed by the chatbot are securely scoped to prevent any sensitive information from being accessed by the wrong individuals within the organization, so do a review of how your current document management security is implemented at the same time.
Increase Your Team’s Awareness and skilling:
Encourage your team to understand emerging technologies, particularly generative AI, to spot opportunities for competitive advantage. This can be achieved through using new off the shelf apps to help them gain first hand experience with the technology, and consulting with your existing vendors about their AI roadmaps.
Many vendors also offer free online training, such as Salesforce’s Trailhead and Microsoft’s Learn. If budget permits, consider short courses or bespoke training from institutions like RMIT Online to quickly upskill your team.
My recommendations - mid term
Automate the back office
As AI tools mature, organizations will be able to deliver “agentic experiences” using generative AI, accelerating workflows that previously slowed down at the document review or creation stage. Microsoft’s recent Copilot Agent and Azure AI Agent Service announcements, for example, are poised to enable these agentic workflows to become achievable very soon for organisations.
For example, you can auto-approve supplier terms in a pdf attached in an email via a workflow, as long as the supplier terms comply with 10 key questions your legal team set, freeing up their time to work on more strategic initiatives and only routing exceptions to them for review.
Expect similar agentic capabilities to emerge from most low-code workflow tools in the industry soon, as the frameworks that underpin these agents (such as Autogen) were open-sourced some time ago, and have since gained a lot of industry acceptance.
Uplift your data estate
While cloud data warehouses are still relevant, the industry is moving towards enriching data with AI and incorporating real-time feeds.
This requires different technology that moves away from the traditional data warehouse, and towards integrated AI and analytics platforms built on the Apache Spark ecosystem. Depending on your budget and level of sophistication, Microsoft Fabric or Databricks are both good options.
Uplift your own apps & customer experiences
With the rapid pace of technological advancement, mid-market organizations can benefit from innovations that simplify the execution of new initiatives. Here are three examples:
Self-Service Customer Experiences: Replace outdated IVR systems with advanced self-serve voice bots. Expect voice bots to handle customer inquiries efficiently, leveraging comprehensive knowledge of your business processes and policies, with the ability to take action without human intervention - for example, telling a customer which store an item is stocked in, and placing it on hold for them to collect.
AI-Enhanced Workflows: CRMs have traditionally offered customer sentiment analysis,, but struggled to do much more until generative AI became mainstream. You can now summarize long-form text into concise, actionable insights. For example, Coles uses AI to summarize customer feedback for store managers.
High-Quality Data Insights: Data pipelines have traditionally focused on ingesting data from various systems into reporting platforms. Now, these pipelines can feed insights back into operational databases. For instance, a logistics provider can use AI to forecast shipment arrivals and display this information in a customer portal or trigger proactive notifications based on the ETA.
By focusing on these areas, mid-market organizations can leverage data and AI technologies to drive growth and maintain a competitive edge in the evolving business landscape.