AI isn't new. Here's how Australia's Top Companies have been using it for decades.

2023 will be defined as the year artificial intelligence fell into the hands of the general public. AI platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney helped people realise they can hack their workload with a simple prompt, in both their professional and personal lives.

But big businesses have been using AI to maximise efficiency for years, and in the case of some companies, even decades. Smaller businesses and startups are now playing catchup.

"Many of our portfolio companies have also been embedding AI into their offerings at a remarkable speed," Raaj Rayat, CFA , a venture capitalist at AirTree told LinkedIn News Australia.

"ChatGPT blew user adoption records out of the water earlier this year, acquiring 100 million users in just two months. Lensa, which allows users to generate images using Stable Diffusion API — another open-source AI model — briefly blew past YouTube and Instagram as the most downloaded iOS app last year," he said.

LinkedIn Top Companies is a look at the 25 best workplaces to grow a career. It’s a resource for job seekers and career builders to identify companies that set workers up for success, explore open jobs, enhance their skills and more. See which companies topped the rankings in Australia and New Zealand.

Read on to learn how LinkedIn's 2023 Top Companies in Australia have been incorporating AI to improve customer support, boost workplace efficiency and assist in recruitment.

Mastercard Australia

Nada George , VP People & Capability, Mastercard Australasia

AI is a powerful tool. Because we have over 20 years of AI expertise, customers can trust that our AI solutions are built on a strategic foundation that prioritises ethics and inclusivity as much as growth and efficiency.

We use Brighterion — a Mastercard company — to prevent fraud on every Mastercard payment.

Mastercard also uses AI internally to help scale the business, increase efficiencies and identify opportunities for revenue.

However, seemingly simple things make a big difference, too. For example, Mastercard’s customer support inbox gets thousands of emails a day. Now, rather than staff manually sorting and routing emails, AI scans messages and directs them to the correct division. While it used to take a couple of days to respond, it now takes a couple of hours.

ServiceNow

Eric Swift , Vice President and Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand

AI?powered tools are critical to enabling the new world of work, where a great experience and internal mobility are priorities for employees and employers.

All of our internal HR and onboarding products are delivered on our core product, the Now Platform — which has built-in AI and machine learning — and which serves up personalised recommendations and content based on an individual’s role and region.

We believe everyone should have equal access to work and development opportunities, regardless of who they know or how well they network. To help deliver on this, ServiceNow recently acquired Hitch Works, a skills mapping and intelligence company.

Hitch adds a new layer of AI?powered skills insights to our Now Platform to help our employees — and our customers — address talent gaps by tying learning and development to workforce planning.

Using these tools, we can more effectively match people to projects from a single platform, with AI recommending courses and programs to develop the necessary technical and soft skills.

Telstra

Darren Fewster , Executive Transformation Communications and People

We are a big user of AI. We use it in customer service to improve product recommendations to help customers get the most suitable products for their needs, and in our networks where we use it to identify potential issues and cyber threats and help required.

We believe our use of AI will increase over the next 12 months, as more automation is being developed and deployed in our customer interactions, networks, security, software development and testing.

NAB

Stevie-Ann Dovico , Executive Digital Technology – Customer and Colleague

AI is not a new technology concept and at NAB we are constantly watching and monitoring of advancements in technology. We already use AI with virtual assistants, chatbots and speech recognition technology to improve productivity across our workplace and help customers conveniently get answers to common queries.

We’re also committed to playing our role in the broader technology ecosystem. For example, we participated in the Australian Government’s AI Ethics Principles Pilot to contribute to further development and discussion about the use of AI.

With new AI developments like ChatGPT rising in popularity and interest, we recognise there is a lot of potential and the evolution of AI is here to stay.

Oracle

Catherine Reynolds , Senior Director Human Resources

While AI has been dominating the recent news cycle, the truth is that we’ve been using AI as an integral part of our business including our HR process and strategy for quite some time.

Using our own HCM platform — Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM — we are able to identify top talent quickly, reduce time to hire, and automatically match requisite skills to relevant job requisitions.

We are also able to optimise employee engagement to achieve higher levels of morale, improved productivity, and maximum career growth. Additionally, we are able to boost productivity by automating routine tasks (expenses, timesheets, etc) and leverage suggested actions to complete them expediently.

If you look at every offering we have, whether it's SaaS, PaaS or IaaS, you'll notice that AI and ML are already fully integrated.

Google Australia

Sophie Richardson , Google Australia New Zealand Staffing Lead

AI is the most profound technology we are working on today. It is a transformational technology that can bring meaningful and positive change to people and societies across the world.

That’s why we re-oriented Google around AI six years ago, making it an ‘AI first company’ — and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Since then, we’ve continued to make investments in AI and research, including starting Google Research Australia — our first research lab in Australia. Based in Sydney, our research team will foster partnerships on-ground to advance AI and machine learning and tackle important challenges for Australians and people around the world.

At the same time, AI, as a still-emerging technology, poses complexities and risks, and our development and use of AI must address these risks. We think it's imperative to pursue AI responsibly.

Amazon

Ian Bradley , Category Leader

AI and Machine Learning is an important part of the business to be able to innovate for our customers. The obvious examples are Alexa and AWS services, and in our robotics fulfilment centre and logistics sites we use AI to assist our team to more easily locate products or boxes that need to be picked or shipped.

The LinkedIn Top Companies?lists are the resource to find the 25 best workplaces to grow your career right now in Australia and New Zealand. The methodology looks at components like how employees are advancing both within a company and when they leave, how they’re upskilling while employed there, and more — revealing companies that help set people up to get ahead in their careers.

Check out this year's LinkedIn Top Companies lists in Australia and New Zealand in full and share your thoughts on the 2023 rankings using #LinkedInTopCompanies.

News Editor: Marty McCarthy