Australia & New Zealand brands lead APAC in agentic AI

Adobe has published new findings showing that Australia and New Zealand brands lead Asia Pacific in identifying practical uses for agentic AI. The study also found that data quality and integration remain the main barriers to wider deployment.

Drawing on responses from consumers, executives and practitioners across Asia Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, India and Singapore, the report points to a gap between business ambition and operational readiness.

In Australia and New Zealand, 70% of brands said they had identified high-value AI applications, the highest share in the region. Yet 77% cited data integration and data quality as key obstacles to scaling agentic AI, underscoring the difficulty of turning early interest into broader implementation.

Only 14% of brands said they had embedded agentic AI across their organisations for customer support, while 12% had done so for brand discovery and search. This suggests most businesses are still at an early stage despite growing attention on the technology.

Adobe's findings also show weak internal alignment. Across Asia Pacific, only 22% of brands reported strong alignment between executives setting AI strategy and practitioners responsible for delivery, suggesting execution issues sit alongside technical constraints.

Consumer response

Consumers in Australia and New Zealand appeared open to AI-driven interactions, though enthusiasm was far from universal. Almost a third, or 29%, said they would interact with a brand's AI agent if one were offered.

At the same time, 43% said they had not yet considered the idea of a personal AI agent, and 27% said they were not open to personal AI agents at all. These figures suggest a sizeable group remains undecided rather than firmly opposed.

Trust and human oversight featured strongly in consumer responses. The most important reassurance was the ability to switch to a human at any time, cited by 36% of respondents, followed by clear labelling at 25%.

That caution appeared elsewhere in the research. While 25% of consumers said they did not care whether a brand used AI as long as their needs were met, 39% said they would stop engaging if they discovered they were speaking to AI when they had expected a human.

Many respondents still want AI interactions to feel closer to human exchanges. Some 69% said AI-driven interactions should feel human rather than robotic.

The findings also showed some acceptance of automated dealings between systems. Around 35% said they would trust an AI agent to interact with a brand's human representative on their behalf, and 23% said they were already comfortable with agent-to-agent interactions.

Speed and pressure

The research comes as brands face increasing pressure to win attention quickly. More than half of consumers, or 57%, said brands have between two and five seconds to capture their interest, while 19% decide whether to engage in under two seconds.

Against that backdrop, many organisations said generative AI was already changing content production. Across the region, 76% said it had improved the volume and speed of content ideation and production, while 74% said it had enabled non-creative teams to produce content.

Australia and New Zealand broadly matched that pattern. Three in four brands in the two markets said generative AI had increased the speed and volume of content production.

The report also points to changing online research habits among consumers. Nearly a fifth, or 17%, said AI-powered platforms were now their main research tool, ahead of brand websites and reviews, while 37% said they use AI assistants as a primary source at least some of the time.

Those who use AI this way said they value it most for answering questions, recommending products and helping with troubleshooting. If that use becomes more widespread, it could reshape how brands approach digital marketing and customer service.

Duncan Egan, Vice President of Enterprise Marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan at Adobe, commented on the regional picture: "Consumer behaviours are shifting across Asia Pacific, with AI already rising in brand discovery and now set to play a greater role in purchasing journeys. Many consumers are comfortable with agentic AI, but say adoption relies on defined, transparent contexts with options for human support."

He added that businesses were seeing operational gains from earlier forms of AI, but still had work to do before agentic systems could be rolled out at scale. "For many organisations, AI is already delivering meaningful improvements to experience delivery and customer growth. Early results from generative AI are translating into accelerated agentic adoption. However, while enthusiasm for agentic AI is high, most brands still need to build the data, governance and orchestration capabilities that will allow these efforts to scale."