What Happened
Illustrative AI-generated image. Mindiam.
About 800 business leaders gathered in Sydney on Tuesday for CommBank's Accelerate AI event to take stock of where Australia sits on adopting artificial intelligence. The picture, according to founders and investors on stage, was sobering: by some measures European companies are adopting AI at twice the rate of Australian companies, and the gap is widening.
Why It Matters
The warning from Seek founder and tech investor Paul Bassat was blunt: "If you don't adopt AI, almost certainly you will lose market share. And ultimately, you will go out of business." For Australian operators framing their AI position as "watching it carefully", the data the summit aired says the watching window has closed. The competitive question is which one or two workflows you put a paid AI tool against first, and how quickly the team is trained to use it well.
Key Details
The event opened with a story from Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht. Soon after ChatGPT's launch, Obrecht gave the AI tool an unorthodox test: plan a global camel delivery service, including logistics, routing and turnaround times. The model nailed it. "If we weren't going to disrupt ourselves," he told the audience, "we were going to be disrupted." Obrecht also noted that the rate of new businesses started in Australia has dropped around 20 per cent over the past decade.
Lorikeet co-founder Jamie Hall gave the operating numbers behind the gap. About 60 per cent of his team's sales are in the US, 25 per cent in Europe, and 15 per cent in Australia. The 15 per cent number sat over the rest of the conversation. Several speakers framed the current capital cycle as historic: investment flowing into AI is estimated at about 2 per cent of global GDP, comparable to US railroads at their 6 per cent peak.
The mood was not defeatist. "It's the risk takers that build the businesses that end up employing people," one founder reminded the room. The advised playbook: "Go head first, try to solve real problems, run into dead ends."
Background and Context
CommBank's Accelerate AI event is part of a wider push by the bank to position itself as an operating partner for Australian small and mid businesses on AI adoption, not just a lender. The bank's framing of the moment was that Australia is "less than one per cent of the way in" to the AI cycle, and that this is "unquestionably the most significant industrial transformation in modern history". The comparison drawn was to the fourth industrial revolution framing, with one update: this one is described as the production of intelligence itself rather than the production of physical goods.
What Comes Next
The event did not announce a specific policy or programme. The signal CommBank wanted to send was about urgency and what individual operators do this quarter rather than what the country does this decade. The next concrete step for any business listening was the one the founders repeated: pick a single workflow, hand it to an AI tool, learn the dead ends, and iterate. The bank flagged further events through the rest of 2026 (further details unstated).
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Europe really adopting AI at twice Australia's rate?
That was the figure aired at the Sydney summit by founders citing their own portfolios. It is consistent with publicly available enterprise-AI adoption surveys through 2025. The summit framed the gap as widening, not closing.
Who attended?
About 800 business leaders, including founders Cliff Obrecht (Canva), Paul Bassat (Seek), Jamie Hall (Lorikeet), and senior CommBank executives (CommBank, May 2026).
What should an Australian small business actually do this week?
Pick one workflow that eats real hours, put one paid AI tool against it, accept dead ends, iterate. Our AI strategy engagement walks AU operators through it in 30 minutes.