This uptake is backed by strong investment: 47% of Australian organisations already have an established spending plan for agentic AI, and 78% are willing to pay a premium of up to 50% to realise its value across the business. C-suite leaders are also setting high expectations, with many targeting a threefold return on investment from agentic AI.
These findings reveal a clear shift from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide automation, as organisations look to scale innovation and remain competitive in a volatile and complex digital world.
Key adoption drivers
Productivity and efficiency gains are proving to be key adoption drivers, as more Australian organisations seek to automate manual processes and elevate the skills of employees. Agentic AI is emerging as a catalyst for enterprise transformation, with AI agents helping organisations rethink how work is designed, executed orchestrated across teams and systems.
Agentic AI is enabling better customer experiences, sharpening competitive advantage and strengthening organisational risk management. The IDC InfoBrief reinforces this, citing gains from agentic AI in productivity (69%), the ability to tackle more complex tasks (68%), and improved decision-making (58%). These tangible outcomes are fuelling uptake across retail, wholesale, financial services, and healthcare and life sciences sectors.
Addressing emerging risks
As Australian organisations deepen their investment into agentic AI, concerns around security, privacy and unintended consequences are coming into sharper focus. Potential misuse by malicious actors (49%), unintended system-user interactions (48%), and data privacy breaches (44%) are key concerns for organisations.
From an implementation standpoint, the challenges are equally significant. Organisations cite data security (59%) as the biggest barrier to adoption, followed by integration with existing systems (50%) and conceptual ambiguity (44%) around how agentic AI should be applied.
As adoption accelerates, addressing these risks will be critical to building trust in agentic systems and ensuring alignment with long-term digital transformation goals.
Agentic automation lays the foundation for scalable AI
While security, integration and governance remain key challenges, Australian organisations are clearly preparing to scale. Many are now moving beyond early use cases to embed agentic AI into the fabric of their operations, with agentic automation becoming the foundation for this shift.
Agentic automation combines agentic AI with robotic process automation to deploy AI agents that go beyond structured, rules-based tasks – tackling complex, unstructured processes with real-time decision-making and adaptive intelligence. It allows organisations to operationalise agentic AI at scale, unlocking a new class of dynamic, context-aware workflows that traditional automation alone cannot address.
“We’re at a pivotal moment for AI in Australia,” said Peter Graves, Area Vice President, Australia and New Zealand at UiPath. “Agentic automation is the missing link between AI experimentation and enterprise transformation. It’s how organisations are starting to put AI agents to work – taking on complex tasks, making decisions in real time, and adapting as they go. It gives them the control and confidence to scale AI safely and effectively. With AI investment in Australia forecast to hit US$12.3 billion by 2028, the organisations laying the right foundations now will be the ones out in front.”
“Becoming an AI-fuelled business is no longer an option in today’s unpredictable climate. For many organisations, it's fast becoming a strategic necessity. In Australia, organisations are embracing agentic AI and agentic automation at scale. Many leaders see its potential to drive unprecedented levels of productivity, innovation, and growth, which will be key to building resilience against future disruptions,” said Deepika Giri, Associate Vice President, AI Research IDC Asia/Pacific / Dr. Chris Marshall, Vice President of Data, Analytics, AI, Sustainability, and Industry Research at IDC.
To download the IDC InfoBrief, titled “Agentic Automation: Unlocking Seamless Orchestration for the Modern Enterprise”, please visit: https://uipath.com/resources/automation-whitepapers/unlock-seamless-orchestration-with-agentic-automation.
