How to scale up your operations without supersizing your operating costs

By Paul Rilstone, Vice President Australia and New Zealand, Kore.ai

Is expansion or diversification on your agenda for 2025? For many Australian enterprises, the answer is ‘yes’, economic uncertainties notwithstanding.

Having weathered the vicissitudes of the past five years – the curve ball that was Covid and the inflationary pressures and interest rate rises that came hot on its heels – leaders in some key industries are cautiously optimistic about what the next 12 months will bring.

Healthcare and social assistance, software and analytics, cybersecurity, education and training, and renewable energy have all enjoyed an uptick in activity and investment in recent years.

So too has the tourism sector, courtesy of the post-pandemic bounce. Meanwhile, construction and engineering firms continue to transform our landscapes with the roll-out of major infrastructure projects, including roads, schools, hospitals and utilities, to service the country’s rapidly growing population.

Struggling to achieve profitable growth

But while your business may have identified an attractive opportunity or several to grow its operations and revenue, doing so in a profitable way can be tricky, particularly in today’s times.

Adding more people to the payroll is often an expense that’s hard to justify, particularly in the early days when you’ve yet to determine whether a foray into pastures new will be a profitable sideline or a major milestone on the growth journey.

Attempting to do more with less – also known as taking shortcuts! – can be counterproductive too. It won’t endear you to your existing employees, who are likely already working at capacity, and it’s unlikely to impress customers in the new segment you’ve set your sights on either.

Embracing the AI advantage

Harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents can give you an alternative and much more attractive option – one-third of all organisations will be taking advantage of by 2028, by Gartner’s reckoning.

While automating straightforward, high volume tasks is already a commonplace means of boosting efficiency across the enterprise, next generation ‘agentic AI’ is capable of doing so much more.

It can form the basis of intelligent adaptable systems that are able to ‘learn’, adapt and grow with your business.

Unlike conventional automation which operates within narrowly defined workflows, AI agents leverage next generation technologies, such as Natural Language Understanding and Machine Learning, to anticipate needs, adapt to dynamic circumstances and make decisions in real time.

Integrated into regular business workflows, they can empower organisations to scale their operations quickly and cost effectively.

Getting smarter and bigger

Elsewhere in the world, businesses are using them to transform their HR function as they grow their operations and workforces. More staff means more administrative work and more queries, about everything from induction to holiday leave entitlements.

Hiring additional HR employees to provide answers adds to the overhead and can be an unnecessary expense, if the enquiries are routine. Hence, ahead-of-the-curve players are deploying AI agents to deliver round-the-clock, multi-lingual support, thereby freeing their human teams up to focus on complex, higher value tasks.

It’s a similar story on the ICT support front. Expanding and ever-more-digitised operations typically generate a bigger workload for the technical staff tasked with keeping things up and running.

Having AI agents handle the routine tasks that drain their resources – think ticket routing and common and garden troubleshooting queries – can free them up to focus on strategic projects that support growth.

Optimising customer experience cost effectively

Meanwhile, in the front office, there’s enormous scope to optimise customer service and experience by using intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) to perform many of the functions of their human counterparts.

Deployed in customer facing roles, their sophisticated natural language processing capability can enable them to ‘understand’ context, participate in dynamic conversations in natural language and provide appropriate, useful responses.

That means they’re able to sort out queries and complaints from customers, in most instances every bit as efficiently and capably as your current team, if not more so.

Building a bigger brighter future for your business in 2025

Next generation AI agents and Intelligent Virtual Agents can put profitable growth within reach for Australian enterprises of all stripes and sizes. If that’s your goal for 2025, it’s transformational technology that should sit at the heart of your ICT stack.