The AI waiting game

Why so many companies are stuck between adopting and waiting

Every business leader has heard the same message for the past two years: adopt AI or get left behind.

But walk into any mid-sized Australian company right now, and you’ll find a different reality. Leadership teams that are curious, cautious, and quietly stuck. They’re not ignoring AI, but they’re not rushing into it either. They’re waiting to see how it plays out, while their competitors do exactly the same thing.

We spoke with two members of the Umbrella Club community, ERP advisor Richard Serpell and cybersecurity contractor Robert Lintun, about what they’re actually seeing inside Australian businesses right now. Their view from two very different corners of IT tells a consistent story: the technology is ready before the organisations are.

A genuinely two-speed economy

The data backs up what our members are seeing on the ground. In the ABS’s 2024-25 Business Characteristics Survey, AI adoption was clearly linked to company size and innovation activity: the adoption rate for innovation-active small businesses was 19%, almost five times greater than for businesses that hadn’t undertaken any innovation activity that year.

In other words, the businesses already comfortable experimenting and adapting are the ones pulling ahead. Everyone else is watching from the sidelines, unsure whether now is the moment to move or the moment to wait.

That hesitation isn’t necessarily poor judgement. As KPMG Australia’s own research shows, the country’s businesses are choosing to prioritise governance and trust over speed, a more considered approach than many took in the first wave of AI hype. But treating a decision seriously and actually making it are two different things, and right now, a lot of Australian companies are stuck between the two.

Australia’s head start on governance, and where it’s costing us

Here’s what makes the Australian story genuinely different from the rest of the world: we’re not behind because we’re careless. KPMG’s Global AI Pulse survey, which collected responses from 2,110 C-suite and senior business leaders in early 2026, found Australia trailing the world on productivity from automation, but leading on governance, cybersecurity, data protection, and building stakeholder confidence.

Source KPMG Australia — Australia leads the world on responsible AI, but lags on productivity gains

What tends to go wrong when businesses move without a plan

Before looking at what our members are seeing directly, it’s worth naming the pattern that shows up again and again in AI projects that stall or backfire. None of the following is unique to any one industry:

• No clear business case before the tools get switched on. Teams start using AI because it’s available, not because a specific problem has been defined
• No single owner of the AI strategy. Multiple departments experiment independently, with no one accountable for how the pieces fit together
• Data readiness gets skipped. AI tools are only as good as the information they’re working from, and most businesses haven’t audited their data before layering AI on top of it
• Governance is treated as a compliance afterthought, rather than something built in from day one
• Success isn’t defined upfront. Without a measurable outcome, it’s impossible to know whether an AI project actually delivered value or just felt like progress
• The workforce is left out of the conversation. Staff are expected to adapt to new tools without training or a clear understanding of why the change is happening

This isn’t just an Australian pattern. Globally, even organisations already using AI report growing challenges around measuring and quantifying value, adapting governance models fast enough, managing data privacy and cyber risk, and addressing workforce resistance. The technology adoption curve is well ahead of the organisational readiness curve, everywhere, not just here.

A quick gut-check for business leaders

Before greenlighting the next AI project, it’s worth being able to answer these plainly:

1. What specific problem is this solving, and how will we know it worked?
2. Who owns this project end to end, and who’s accountable if it goes wrong?
3. Is our data clean and structured enough to actually support this?
4. Have we defined who can build or deploy AI tools, and who has to sign off first?
5. Have the people who’ll use this day-to-day actually been part of the conversation?

If more than one or two of these don’t have a confident answer, that’s usually the real reason a business is stuck in the waiting game, not the technology itself.

What our members are seeing first-hand

ERP: Excitement without governance

Richard Serpell has spent decades helping medium-sized businesses select and implement ERP software, and he’s now watching those same businesses grapple with AI layered on top of their existing systems. His read on the situation is blunt: the appetite is there, but the structure to manage it often isn’t.

‘The thing companies are finding is that the governance of AI development is critical and often not there. You end up with people willy-nilly building stuff, and you’ll end up with six different people building the same thing,’ says Richard Serpell, ERP Advisor and Umbrella Club member.

This isn’t a hypothetical concern. Richard has seen it happen with clients directly, including staff independently subscribing to paid AI tools without any central oversight, creating duplicated cost and duplicated effort inside the same organisation.

He also cautions against the opposite failure mode: treating AI purely as a novelty rather than a genuine business tool.

‘AI is a toy, and people are having fun at work building stuff because it’s fun, which is not why you’re at work. It has the potential for wasting a lot of time and money, and coming up with garbage because you’re not specific enough around your prompts,’ says Richard.

His conclusion isn’t that businesses should slow down. It’s that they need someone steering the process who understands both the technology and the organisation, rather than leaving adoption to chance.

Cybersecurity: Most companies aren’t ready for what’s next

From a cybersecurity perspective, member Robert Lintun sees a similar hesitation, but for different reasons. Rather than a governance problem, he describes a maturity gap: most organisations simply aren’t ready to hand AI anything beyond the basics.

‘AI has been a really hot topic recently, but not many companies are mature enough to move into that direction. AI mostly impacts entry-level things (Level 1, Level 2 kind of IT technical stuff) because you can automate a lot of that more easily than it used to be. I’d say the majority of companies stay there for now,’ says Robert, Cybersecurity Contractor and Umbrella Club member.

That caution has a sound basis. As a security specialist, Robert has watched what happens when automation moves faster than an organisation’s ability to check it.

‘Every revolution comes with threat and opportunity, and for me, I see AI as an opportunity for contractors. Of course, organisations can automate and deploy agents to save cost, but you can’t fully trust automation or trade away human oversight. I’ll give you an example: the Microsoft and CrowdStrike incident that happened a couple of years ago. They relied on automation and released production code to the production environment without a human checking it first. You can’t ignore the human factor at all,’ says Robert.

For a security-conscious business, this is a reasonable case for caution. But it’s also a reason to invest in the right expertise now, rather than waiting until an AI-related incident forces the issue.

Get ahead, or wait and see?

Put Richard and Robert’s observations side by side, and a clear pattern emerges. Neither is telling businesses to slow down on AI. Both are describing the same underlying issue from different angles: organisations are adopting the tools faster than they’re building the judgement, structure, and oversight to use them well.

That’s the real waiting game happening across Australian business right now. It’s not ‘should we use AI or not.’ It’s ‘who is actually qualified to help us do this properly, and where do we find them?’

Australian businesses are adopting AI, but confidence, clarity, and trust still lag behind the pace of adoption. The gap isn’t access to the technology. It’s access to people who’ve seen enough ERP rollouts and security incidents to know where things typically go wrong, and who can help a business avoid repeating those mistakes.

Why this matters for the Umbrella Club community

This is exactly the gap Umbrella Club exists to close. Our members aren’t generalist consultants guessing their way through AI hype. They’re experienced, independent IT professionals, from ERP advisors like Richard to cybersecurity specialists like Robert, who’ve spent years inside real projects, real implementations, and real incidents.

Businesses navigating the AI waiting game don’t need another vendor pitch. They need experienced, trusted people who can tell them honestly where the opportunity is and where the risk sits. That’s the model Umbrella Club was built on: a vetted community of Australia’s top IT contractors, connected to organisations that need proven expertise, not guesswork.

If you’re a business trying to work out your next move on AI, or an experienced IT contractor who wants to be part of a community built on trust and shared expertise, get in touch with Umbrella Club to find out more.

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