New research reveals personal AI use is the primary driver of workplace adoption across Australia and New Zealand.
What’s Happening: A Salesforce study of 2,132 Australian and New Zealand knowledge workers reveals 86 per cent now use AI in their personal lives. Critically, this personal experimentation is driving professional adoption. Seventy-four per cent say personal AI use has boosted their workplace confidence.
Why This Matters: Australian businesses face an immediate workforce expectation problem. Employees trained on consumer AI tools like ChatGPT now demand enterprise solutions. The gap between personal AI familiarity and workplace capability is widening, creating retention risks and productivity challenges.
Australians are conducting their own AI experiments at home, and the results are reshaping expectations in the office. A study by Salesforce and YouGov of 2,132 Australian and New Zealand knowledge workers, conducted in September 2025, offers a clear picture of how personal AI use is driving workplace adoption.
Eighty-six per cent of respondents now use AI in their personal lives. Interior design, travel planning, writing, research, coding. The applications are endless, and the learning curve has flattened dramatically. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of other AI tools have become household names. This personal experimentation has created a cohort of AI-literate workers.
More importantly, the research reveals personal use is driving professional adoption. Seventy-four per cent of respondents said personal AI use has boosted their confidence in AI at work. That’s not a side effect of the technology. It’s the primary mechanism of workplace adoption.
Kevin Doyle, RVP of Agentforce and Data 360 at Salesforce, frames this as a critical moment for business leaders. “Confidence in AI is at an all-time high. Companies can build on this confidence by ensuring that trust is the first ingredient, not an afterthought,” Doyle said. “Employees don’t want to leave AI at the office door. They know that an agentic enterprise, where humans and AI agents work smoothly side-by-side, is a stronger business.”
The personal AI experience is also reshaping customer expectations. Eighty-eight per cent of respondents said their personal AI use has raised their expectations as consumers. They demand quicker service (46 per cent), expect fewer errors (44 per cent), and desire more personalised experiences (41 per cent). This consumer-focused mindset is now flowing back into the workplace, where employees expect organisations to deliver the same speed and personalisation they experience in their personal lives.
The Rise of Autonomous AI Agents
The transition underway isn’t simply about deploying chatbots. A fundamental shift is occurring from simple question-answering tools to autonomous AI agents that can take action, make decisions within parameters, and drive outcomes without human intervention for each step.
Seventy-six per cent of knowledge workers surveyed have already engaged with AI agents. That’s not pilots or experimentation. That’s active, hands-on engagement with autonomous systems. Ninety-five per cent expect agents to have a positive impact on their roles within the next two years.
Real-world deployments are already showing measurable ROI. Scape, a purpose-built student accommodation provider, integrated Salesforce’s Agentforce to automate routine communications and operational summaries. The results were striking.
Anouk Darling, CEO of Scape, describes the shift in concrete terms. “When routine tasks drop from hours to minutes, we don’t just gain speed, we gain attention. Used well, AI doesn’t make us more robotic. It makes us more present,” Darling said. “AI now helps us improve consistency and response speeds by up to 85 per cent. It doesn’t make us more robotic. It allows our team to be more present for our residents.”
This experience mirrors global trends. According to Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise Index, Australian consumers using AI agents report 64 per cent higher customer satisfaction than those without agent interaction. In consumer-facing industries like retail and financial services, the impact is even starker. Australian consumers who have used AI agents are 170 per cent more likely to say their retail experience has improved and 229 per cent more likely to report improvement in financial services.
But adoption requires more than confidence. It requires action at the technology level. Heidi Verlaan, Senior Brand and Marketing Manager at Scape, describes how personal AI experience translates to workplace deployment. “Personal use of AI, from travel planning to interior design, has trained me to explore and experiment more. It’s given me the confidence to move from AI happening in the background to something I actively chose to use,” Verlaan said. “The more I use it, the clearer I am on where it can help. AI isn’t a magic tool. It fits into my workflow, helping me be more productive and improve my outcomes, while I keep the human layer where it matters.”
Trust is the Gateway to Adoption
Yet confidence alone is insufficient. Employees are sending a clear message to leadership: they want guardrails.
The research identified four critical requirements for employees to feel comfortable using AI agents at work. Transparency and control topped the list (47 per cent), followed by access to expert support (45 per cent), security and privacy guardrails (43 per cent), and easy access to approved tools (40 per cent).
These aren’t demands for open access. Workers are asking for managed, transparent environments where they understand how AI is being used, who has control, and what protections exist. This creates a paradox for IT leaders. Workers want AI integrated into daily work, but they want safeguards around how that happens.
Kevin Doyle addresses this head-on. “The urgency for business leaders is to move AI out of the sandbox and into the heart of operations. By building on a foundation of trusted, real-time data, companies can finally close the last mile of AI and turn potential into measurable ROI.”
The data challenge is real. Research from Salesforce shows 88 per cent of Australian data and analytics leaders say their organisations’ data strategies require a complete rethink to enable effective AI deployment. Fifty-six per cent of Australian organisations training or fine-tuning AI models have wasted resources due to flawed data.
Trust hinges on data quality, security, and transparency. Without these, adoption stalls. But when organisations get the foundations right, the ROI becomes visible quickly. Scape’s 85 per cent improvement in response speeds is one example. At scale, these improvements compound across organisations.
Moving Forward
The workforce is ready. Eighty-six per cent of Australian workers have personal AI experience. Seventy-six per cent have engaged with workplace AI agents. Ninety-five per cent expect agents to improve their roles.
The question is no longer whether to adopt AI. It’s whether organisations can build the trust foundations, data infrastructure, and transparent governance frameworks that workers now demand. The employees who trained themselves on consumer AI aren’t waiting. They’re voting with their engagement and expectations. Organisations that respond will unlock productivity gains. Those that delay will face retention pressures and competitive disadvantage.
