Reflections from WOBI and the AI Summit Sydney

1. Rapid Adoption Curve

AI has scaled at an unprecedented pace. Where personal computers, mobile phones and cloud computing took decades to reach one billion users, AI reached the same milestone in less than 3 years. The pace of adoption is accelerating far beyond previous technology cycles.

This reflects both the accessibility of AI tools and the immediacy of their value – organisations can adopt and deploy AI almost instantly, without the heavy infrastructure investments required in past technology cycles.

2. Scale and Speed of Capability Growth

AI capability growth is equally remarkable. Recent research finds that the length of tasks that frontier AI agents can reliably complete has been doubling ~ every 7 months since 2019.

This step-change is redefining what individuals and organisations are capable of achieving. Tasks that previously took a few weeks can now be completed within a few hours with the support of AI. Decision-making is faster, analysis is deeper, and operational bottlenecks are being eliminated. The gap between AI-enabled and non-AI-enabled organisations is widening, and this trend is expected to accelerate.

3. AI as a Productivity Engine

AI should be viewed as an enabler rather than a cost-cutting tool.
An example: Instead of taking a workforce from 100 to 50, AI empowers 100 people to deliver the output of 200.

This represents a fundamental shift from substitution to augmentation. Organisations that harness AI effectively will see significant uplift in efficiency, speed, quality and scalability. For service-based businesses in particular, AI becomes a lever to improve margins, expand capacity and enhance client outcomes without proportional increases in cost.

4. Customer Trust and the Human Experience

Despite the momentum behind AI, customer sentiment remains cautious. Some key concerns include:

• Losing the ability to speak to a real person
• Fears around the security and use of personal data
• Skepticism over AI’s ability to interpret emotion, nuance or context

These concerns demonstrate that AI adoption is as much a human challenge as a technological one. Organisations that combine automation with thoughtful human engagement will differentiate themselves and build trust faster. Embedding transparency, strong data governance and clear escalation pathways will be crucial to customer confidence.

5. Human & AI Collaboration

AI is a powerful tool, but it requires intelligent design and integration. When implemented without structure, AI can increase complexity, confusion and operational noise. Human judgement remains essential in shaping workflows, validating outputs and ensuring AI aligns with strategic objectives. The most effective organisations will be those that blend human experience with AI capability – using people to guide, interpret and refine, and using AI to optimise, automate and accelerate.

Implications for M&A

In our work across mid-market B2B services, we are seeing businesses increasingly incorporate AI into their products/services, delivery models and internal operations.

While some buyers remain selective on pure AI plays, interest is growing for companies that:

• are AI-enabled (not AI-dependent)
• demonstrate productivity uplift through automation
• embed AI to improve delivery quality and customer experience

The direction of travel is clear: organisations that do not begin leveraging AI risk falling behind their competitors. As adoption matures, AI will become as integral as cloud or mobile –  a core capability rather than a differentiator.

SCD will continue to monitor these developments closely as they increasingly shape strategy, valuation, and buyer appetite in the mid-market M&A landscape.