Stacked Marketing Tools Stalling Aussie Brands’ AI ambitions: Twilio Poll

Australian marketing and CX leaders have said that having too many disparate technology tools is making it harder to realise productivity gains from Agentic AI. This is according to a poll conducted by Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalised experiences for today’s leading brands.

Conducted amongst delegates at the Customer Contact Week Australia and New Zealand in Sydney, the survey showed that 85% of respondents said tech fragmentation makes managing AI Agent productivity more difficult.

Businesses grappling with AI Agent productivity

AI Agent productivity was also a key issue cited by attendees. Almost all (94%) of those surveyed said their organisation would achieve more financial gains with better AI Agent productivity, with close to half citing a possible financial benefit of 50% or more.

For most respondents, greater AI Agent productivity would also lead to other business gains, including faster innovation (66%) and improved customer satisfaction scores (52%). Conversely, most said that security would not be improved (65%), revealing lingering concerns around AI Agents’ impact on data privacy and protection.

The poll also showed that AI Agents are still taking up too much time from employees, with 25% of respondents saying it takes up half or more of their teams’ time, and 41% saying it takes a quarter of their teams’ time.

“We are in this transient period right now, where most organisations are deploying AI Agents, but not yet using them strategically, or seeing the full ROI. Many teams are also still spending as much or more time managing these AI Agents than they are saving,” said Howard Fyffe, Director of Australia and New Zealand, Twilio.

“This is being compounded as marketing leaders have too many disparate technology tools. There was a consensus among many delegates that the issue of tech fragmentation, and contact centres not built for the AI Age, was making it harder to use and manage AI Agents as effectively as they’d like.”

AI Agents still not being used strategically

The poll found that AI Agents are still not being used strategically by most organisations, and in some cases have not yet been deployed at all. One quarter (24%) of respondents said they are using AI Agents on an ad-hoc basis with no central strategy, 31% said they were still experimenting with pilots but not yet scaling, and 13% are still sceptical and yet to deploy.

“Only around one-third of the industry people we spoke to have multiple agents in production, who are driving core business goals in their organisations. This, along with conversations we are having every day within the industry, shows us that locally in Australia we are only touching the surface of what’s possible with Agentic AI, and the real gains are yet to come. There are exciting times ahead,” concluded Fyffe.