Rising artificial intelligence could automate up to half of today’s work within 20 years, and organisations must prepare now, AI expert Tim Fountaine told NAB’s Transaction Banking customer event series.
The explosion of AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot has created an opportunity to rethink entire industries and unlock trillions of dollars of economic value, experts said.
For Fountaine, who founded McKinsey’s QuantumBlack AI consultancy in Asia, a vastly transformed future is something Australian businesses must prepare for, as he warned of widening gaps between digital leaders and laggards.
“As you think about where this all might go, you have to contemplate futures that are very, very different from today,” he said. “That change is going to be far faster than anyone is expecting.”
Speaking at NAB’s 2025 Transaction Banking event, Fountaine highlighted that AI capabilities – from language comprehension to predictive reasoning – have rapidly advanced beyond expert expectations.
Fountaine pointed to updated McKinsey Global Institute research showing that, spurred by generative AI, more than half of all current work activities could be automated by 2045.
“The rapid rate of progress has surprised even the experts until recently,” he said. “Predictions now say generative AI will accelerate the automation potential to unlock trillions of dollars over the global economy.”
While this highly automated future is just one scenario, it underscores the significant impact AI will have during the careers of today’s workforce, he said.
In Australia, major lenders and brokers are already leaning into AI.
Fountaine warned that AI would amplify the gap between technology adopters and laggards, urging businesses to rethink not just technology but entire workflows and products.
“Pick one or two areas of the company to focus on that are absolutely vital,” he said. “Maybe it’s a bottleneck, or what’s most crucial to improving your customer outcomes, or your strategy versus your competitors.
“Concentrate your efforts on these areas and really think how would you re-engineer what’s there. It’s not just about sticking AI on top.”
Successful AI integration demands a strong culture of learning, collaboration between digital and business teams, and scalable data practices, Fountaine said.
“If you can produce data in a way that allows multiple uses, it just saves so much time and money,” he said, highlighting that managing data is often the slowest part of AI projects.
Fountaine also stressed that about half of AI budgets typically go into change management – redesigning processes, communicating changes, and retraining teams.
“The more of the executive team that understands this technology, the better companies tend to do,” he said. “We all need to get smart on this, we can’t just leave it to the technology people or the digital people.”
Fountaine emphasised the need for future workers to develop strong foundational skills in maths, writing, critical thinking, and coding.
“Our job will become much more about defining objectives and questions,” he said. “How do you break a problem down into its constituent parts so that you can then have AI work on each piece?”
Fountaine added that coding skills and logical thinking would remain vital to ensure that “it is the human driving the AI and not the other way round.”
“AI is not right all the time. Kids need to be able to understand that and think for themselves,” he said.
“The first thing we need is really learning to love learning. To be able to go out and find information, put it together and come up with your own perspective. It’s important to understand that.”
