After the devastating 2019-20 bushfires, WIRES had to grow fast—new teams, new services, and more than 1,000 volunteers across NSW. But that rapid growth also brought complexity. Teams built their own systems. Data lived in silos. We couldn’t scale that way. Using a platform like HubSpot let us unify everything into a single system, from our 24/7 wildlife rescue hotline to donor engagement and volunteer coordination. It’s helped us move from reactive chaos to proactive, sustainable scale.
Marcus Cooper
CTO
WIRES
Operational efficiency improvements gain significance as a growth driver as the business size grows demonstrating how enterprise-level businesses are leveraging technology and integration to operate at scale.
At NOW Finance, we flipped our entire architecture from product-first to people-first. We needed a system that let us design every interaction around the customer, not the loan. That shift has been critical for building long-term trust as we scale across brokers, direct channels, and white-label partners. Having a unified platform to map complex relationships has been essential to launching new products, growing efficiently, and being truly customer centric.
Chris Maccan
CMO
NOW Finance
Key barriers restricting business growth
Economic uncertainty is the top growth barrier for 38% of Australian businesses, with some possibly feeling the impact of trade and tariff headwinds. Talent shortages — reported by 28% of businesses — are particularly acute in Australia, where a persistent skills gap is slowing growth. Limited funding (27%), slow decision-making (24%), manual inefficiencies (22%), and tech integration challenges (22%) also continue to hold back growth.
Barriers vary by business size, but economic uncertainty is a shared concern.
Economic uncertainty tops the list of challenges across all business sizes, with 38% of small, mid-market, and upmarket businesses citing it as a key barrier to growth.
Beyond that, growth barriers begin to diverge - here are the top barriers by business size:
We had the strategy. We had the leads. But we didn’t have the speed. AI forced us to rethink how we operate. But here’s the thing: for AI to truly work, it needs context, and that only comes with connected systems and a unified tech stack. Having that in place has made our execution faster, smarter, and more scalable.
Mark Deacon
Chief Commercial Officer
Canibuild
It's no secret AI has compressed years of innovation into months. In the conversations I've had with marketers across APAC, many of us feel overwhelmed by this rapid change. As leaders, we have the unique opportunity to encourage experimentation and embrace new technology to help solve business growth challenges, making teams AI-first without adding unnecessary complexity or additional tools with a whole new learning curve.
Kat Warboys
Senior Director, Marketing
HubSpot
Digital maturity and technology adoption in Australia
Australian businesses have made significant strides in digital adoption, but most are still on the journey to full digital maturity.
Australia's digital landscape: Strong start, clear challenges.
90% of Australian businesses are at least partially digitalised, but only 18% have reached full digital maturity. Another 39% are significantly digitalised, while a third are still in the early stages.
The impact of technology adoption
Where businesses have made digital investments, the impact is clear: 86% report improved productivity, with almost 1 in 5 businesses seeing a 20% or greater lift.
Customer-facing benefits are clear, too: 86% of companies report technology has improved the customer experience, with 21% seeing significant gains.
Notably, larger businesses tend to see stronger results from technology adoption. While 90% of small businesses report productivity gains, this rises to 93% for mid-sized businesses and remains at 90% for larger enterprises - showing how scale and digital maturity can influence the impact.
With more than 400 offices, communication, transparency, and visibility are essential at LJ Hooker. This was why we moved away from decades-old legacy systems to cloud-based tools that could scale without heavy customisation. A key goal was unifying communications, contract management, and performance tracking across our franchise network. But the real shift came from leadership - when your CEO is in the system daily and expects others to be too, adoption becomes embedded in the culture.
Jenny Talbot
GM Delivery and Procurement
LJ Hooker
System integration is where efficiency, speed, and ROI begin to compound. While 90% of businesses have started integrating systems, only 18% are fully integrated - a gap with real consequences.
Fully integrated companies are 4x more likely to realise ROI from new technology investments within a month, compared to those with minimal or no integration. And beyond time to value, 77% of fully integrated businesses say they outperform their peers, suggesting a direct link between integration maturity and competitive advantage. 45% say they’re mostly integrated, and 28% are only partially integrated, leaving a significant portion of businesses stuck in the “in-between,” where fragmentation continues to slow execution and limit visibility.
Tech adoption is a great first step, but it’s integration that truly unlocks growth. Integration is the bridge between potential and performance. What good is customer data if it’s isolated in one system or only accessible to one team? The companies that win have fully integrated systems that connect every part of the customer journey.
Scott Brinker
Case Study: Azora Finance Group
Azora Finance Group faced operational chaos as they scaled rapidly in 2019, with no single source of truth for managing broker relationships, manual siloed sales processes, and limited visibility into deal flow and broker performance that hindered leadership decision-making at speed. The company needed infrastructure to support high-velocity growth while targeting $600 million in annual originations and a $1 billion loan book.
Azora implemented HubSpot as their comprehensive platform, creating a centralised command centre with Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub that seamlessly integrated with their proprietary origination system.
The transformation delivered remarkable results:
- 300% growth in their loan book
- 75% reduction in loan approval times
- 15% increase in conversion rates
- 60% growth in their broker network
And they managed this growth while keeping the same team size. The unified platform eliminated operational bottlenecks and created a data-driven culture where all teams work from live data with complete visibility into performance metrics.
Azora Finance Group went from fragmented operations to 300% growth through system integration
AI’s reported benefits line up with expectations around speed and scale.
Increased efficiency (36%) and productivity (33%) remain the most common outcomes, highlighting AI’s role in making operations run faster and leaner. Financial outcomes like reduced costs (29%) and increased revenue (27%) are also taking shape. And with customer satisfaction improvements (27%) rounding out the list, it’s clear AI is beginning to drive impact across several business functions.
We’re seeing a new kind of competitive edge emerge - and it’s being driven by AI. Among businesses that report significantly outperforming their peers, nearly 90% have implemented AI, and 40% are at an advanced stage of adoption, more than 3x the average. Just a year ago, our research found that while 51% of leaders were experimenting with AI personally, organisational adoption was lagging. That gap is now closing - fast. For smaller businesses, this levels the playing field. AI-powered tools for content creation, automation, and insight generation are giving leaner teams the kind of scale, precision, and speed that was once out of reach.
Kat Warboys
Senior Marketing Director
HubSpot
At Canibuild, we approached AI like hiring a new team member. We didn’t just roll out tools. We hired AI agents into the parts of the business that actually needed them. Then we onboarded them properly, trained them, reviewed their performance, and kept optimising. The difference is, once an AI agent is up to speed, it becomes a reliable partner—always-on, always ready to support our teams so they can focus on higher-impact work. Having an integrated system meant we could give those agents the full context they needed from day one. That mindset has delivered real gains in speed, customer experience, and scale for our business - for example, reducing our average first response time from hours to seconds.
Mark Deacon
Chief Commercial Officer
Canibuild
These hurdles become far more manageable in integrated environments, where unified systems reduce complexity, lower the need for deep technical expertise across multiple tools, and simplify security frameworks.
Getting real value from AI starts with good data. Structured CRM data is still just as important as ever. But AI also needs unstructured data- calls, emails, and meeting transcripts, where you hear your customer’s voice in their own words. That’s what takes AI from good to great. AI agents need context and connection. We’ve seen too often that isolated AI tools working on separate tasks get stuck in the same silos as traditional apps. For AI to make a real difference, these agents have to communicate and share insights across the entire customer journey.
Nicholas Holland
Head of AI, SVP Product
HubSpot
Best practices for fast, secure AI adoption
For leaders taking AI beyond pilots into strategic execution:
Start with high-impact, cost-saving use cases: Begin your AI journey with one or two focused applications that reduce costs and show quick, measurable wins—like automating routine support queries with Customer Agent or drafting outbound emails. These early successes build confidence, demonstrate value, and create internal momentum for wider adoption.
Ensure data quality and system integration before AI deployment: Before implementing AI tools, ensure your core business systems can share data effectively and accurately. The smartest AI needs connected, contextual data from across your CRM, marketing, sales, and service touchpoints.
Target operational efficiency gains before revenue-focused applications: Build a strong foundation for AI adoption by tackling inefficiencies first—this creates the stability needed to scale more ambitious, revenue-driving use cases later.
Embed privacy from the beginning: Design your AI implementation and processes around “Privacy by Design” principles. Make consent, transparency, and security non-negotiables from day one, and clearly communicate your approach to customers and teams.
Build internal expertise through strategic partnerships: Close capability gaps by working with trusted partners who can help guide implementation, upskill your teams, and accelerate time to value.
Best practices for AI implementation
Technology ROI: expectations vs reality
Technology investments are only worthwhile if they deliver real, measurable returns. And businesses are seeing the benefits of their technology investments sooner than anticipated. While the average business anticipated a 6.2-month ROI window, the reality is closer to 4.4 months, which means that Australian businesses are seeing value faster than anticipated.
In fact, more than half expect returns within six months:
- 30% expect ROI within 2–3 months
- 26% expect ROI within 4–6 months
- 18% expect ROI within 7–12 months
Businesses with higher digital maturity, however, are seeing significantly faster returns on their technology investments. For fully digitalised companies, 64% achieve ROI in under three months - well ahead of the average 4.4-month timeframe across all businesses.
Similarly, businesses with advanced AI implementation are experiencing even quicker returns, with 68% seeing ROI within three months - again outpacing the overall average.
Expectation
Reality
Top growth priorities for the next 12 months
Australian businesses are looking inward and outward as they map out their next phase of growth. Operational efficiency tops the list, with 33% of businesses making it their main growth priority.
Customer retention (31%) and reaching new segments (28%) follow closely, suggesting a strong push to strengthen existing relationships while expanding reach. Improving sales processes (27%) and investing in AI or automation (25%) also rank high as businesses gear up for scalable growth.
What's needed to connect businesses with their next phase of growth?
For many, it starts with people and policy. Upskilling employees for digital transformation is the top priority (44%), followed closely by a call for stronger government support (42%). Businesses are also looking to accelerate growth through increased AI adoption (34%), better market intelligence (31%), and more unified systems to cut down inefficiencies (28%).
But not every company needs the same resources to grow. Here are the growth resources those outperforming and underperforming against their peers prioritise as important to them.
For companies outperforming:
- stronger government incentives and support [50%]
- Increased AI adoption and automation tools [49%]
- Upskilling employees for digital transformation [46%]
For companies underperforming:
- Access to better market intelligence [62%]
- Increased AI adoption and automation tools [49%]
- Upskilling employees for digital transformation [38%]
Impact of the global economic climate
The global economy is influencing local decision-making. While 58% of Australian businesses are being more cautious with their growth approach in response to global uncertainty, a smaller but significant 12% are taking the opportunity to be more aggressive, showing that bold strategy still has a place in challenging times. The remaining 30% are sticking to their current course.
Market expansion challenges
Despite strong appetite for growth, Australian businesses are navigating real barriers to market expansion. Competition from established players (30%) and entry costs (29%) are the biggest challenges, but many also cite economic uncertainty (25%), supply chain complexity (22%), and the need for better customer insights/market intelligence (21%).
Case Study: BruntWork
BruntWork
needed to rapidly scale their remote outsourcing business across multiple industries, countries, and languages while onboarding 2-300 people monthly. They required a CRM platform that could grow quickly, provide transparency for global decision-making, and avoid the prohibitive costs and complexity of their previous Salesforce system.
The BruntWork team implemented HubSpot as their single source of truth, enabling them to scale to 2,500 staff across Australia, Colombia, Serbia, Ukraine, and the Philippines with clients in 14+ countries, reaching $50 million in recurring revenue within three years.
“A lot of the success is because of the technology - we run multiple teams with a single source of truth, easy training and simple upskilling which is exactly what you need when you’re bringing on 2-300 people a month,” says Adam Pisk, Chief Revenue Officer at BruntWork.
The platform's ease of use created a streamlined 2-week onboarding process for new staff, while comprehensive analytics enabled strategic pivots including refocusing 70% of new business toward North American markets based on data-driven insights tracking the entire customer lifecycle from keyword performance to lifetime value.
BruntWork scaled global remote operations to $5M+ MRR through technology integration
We always knew the sales cycle was long, but we didn’t know how long. Having that visibility changed the conversation. It gave us the ability to tell the story to stakeholders, wrap it in real data, and plan with confidence. Now we can model pipeline health with more precision and understand what it really takes to hit our growth targets.
Jenny Talbot
GM of Delivery and Procurement
LJ Hooker
Growth framework amidst economic uncertainty
Double down on what works: Focus on tools and workflows that deliver quick, measurable returns.
Build an agile tech stack: Connect your systems to eliminate silos, reduce handoffs, surface data in real time, and move faster under pressure.
Design for resilience and scale: Use flexible frameworks and automation to adapt quickly and without driving up costs.
Make every customer count: Use integrated data to personalise every support, marketing, and service touchpoint and build loyalty that lasts.
Lead with data clarity: Real-time insights empower confident decisions and separate the reactive from the resilient.
Partner to go further: Develop relationships with like-minded businesses to share resources and broaden your reach.
