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Jun 21, 2023
SYDNEY, Australia – June 22, 2023 – More than one-third of Australian IT leaders (35%) believe their existing IT infrastructure is not fully prepared for the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, despite its widespread adoption across industries, according to the Equinix 2023 Global Tech Trends Survey. The survey, which examined IT leaders’ responses to AI advances in their organisations, comes after a year of significant AI breakthroughs that saw the technology rapidly deployed in applications across both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer sectors.
“Australian tech leaders are expediting AI’s integration into their organisations, and it is increasingly becoming a critical capability to enable intelligent and autonomous systems that power a modern business. Those who fail to maximise its use are at risk of quickly falling behind,” said Guy Danskine, Managing Director, Equinix Australia.
The survey confirmed AI uptake is on the rise across all industry sectors, with IT decision-makers seeking to benefit from the advantages of AI and are already using or planning to use it across multiple key functions. According to the report, Australian organisations are most likely to be using AI, or planning to do so, in IT operations (76%), followed by cybersecurity (74%), customer experience (73%) and sales (70%).
“The effective development of precise AI models relies on the secure and fast accessibility to internal and external data sources, which may be distributed across various cloud platforms and data brokers,” added Danskine.
“As Australian enterprises venture into developing their own private generative AI solutions, they may prioritise processing their sensitive data in a secure and private environment that offers fast connectivity to external data sources and AI models. Additionally, with a substantial amount of data increasingly generated at the edge, this necessitates moving AI processing nearby to ensure optimal performance, privacy, ultra-low latency and cost-effectiveness.
“To meet these new demands, technology leaders can opt for hybrid solutions that allow AI model training and inference to take place at different locations. Ultimately, to build scalable AI solutions, businesses need to assess whether their IT frameworks can handle the significant and varied data sets involved in terms of ingestion, sharing, storage, and processing. Moreover, they must do so while considering sustainability as an important aspect,” Danskine said.
On implementing complex AI strategies, Aengus Tran, CEO & Co-Founder at harrison.ai, noted: “Secure hosting of our compute and data storage platforms is our highest technical priority as we build AI solutions for clinicians across the world. We rely on an extremely fast and direct connection to enable hybrid cloud models as required to move remarkably large data sets on which we train and develop our AI solutions. This digital infrastructure enables us to tackle bigger healthcare problems, from medical imaging solutions to new AI healthcare solutions requiring more data and processing, helping to improve the standard of global healthcare and achieve our vision to impact one million lives per day.”
Aside from existing IT infrastructure, globally more than four in 10 IT leaders said they are not very comfortable with their team’s ability to accommodate AI’s growing use – in Australia, respondents were more optimistic at 36%.
Looking ahead at future technology priorities in Australia, 73% plan to deploy AI technologies, up from 70% the year prior. However, when asked about threats to business success, 65% of respondents are concerned about the explosion of data from adopting new technologies, such as AI, and 67% are worried they are not moving fast enough in their digital transformation.
Despite a somber backdrop fraught with ongoing global uncertainties, Asia-Pacific remains a strong and dynamic region projected to contribute around 70% of global growth in 2023.[1] Findings from the Equinix 2023 Global Tech Trends Survey echoes that with 77% of Australian businesses planning to expand geographically in the next 12 months.
A full copy of the global report can be found here.
About the Survey
The independent study, commissioned by Equinix, surveyed more than 2,900 IT decision-makers in diverse enterprises across the Americas (Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, U.S.), Asia-Pacific (Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea), and EMEA (Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, UK). Respondents were selected for participation from Dynata's online panel. The survey was conducted online between March 20, 2023 and April 07, 2023.
About Equinix
Equinix (Nasdaq: EQIX) is the world’s digital infrastructure company®. Digital leaders harness Equinix’s trusted platform to bring together and interconnect foundational infrastructure at software speed. Equinix enables organizations to access all the right places, partners and possibilities to scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value, while supporting their sustainability goals.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to, risks to our business and operating results related to the current inflationary environment; foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations; increased costs to procure power and the general volatility in the global energy market; the challenges of acquiring, operating and constructing IBX® and xScale® data centers and developing, deploying and delivering Equinix products and solutions; unanticipated costs or difficulties relating to the integration of companies we have acquired or will acquire into Equinix; a failure to receive significant revenues from customers in recently built out or acquired data centers; failure to complete any financing arrangements contemplated from time to time; competition from existing and new competitors; the ability to generate sufficient cash flow or otherwise obtain funds to repay new or outstanding indebtedness; the loss or decline in business from our key customers; risks related to our taxation as a REIT and other risks described from time to time in Equinix filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see recent and upcoming Equinix quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release.
Media Contacts (Asia-Pacific)
Annie Ho
Equinix
+852 2970 7761
annho@ap.equinix.com
Media Contact (Australia)
Graham White
Pratar
+61 404 840 533
graham@pratar.com.au
[1] Regional Economic Outlook, Asia and Pacific, International Monetary Fund, May 2023