42% of Australian SMEs Now Use AI. The Industry Gap Is 3 to 1.

NAB Economics published its SME AI adoption report on 20 April, surveying approximately 670 Australian businesses across the non-farm sector. The topline: 42% of Australian SMEs now use AI. A further 14% plan to adopt. That puts the combined figure at 56% — for the first time, AI-engaged businesses outnumber the holdouts.

But the aggregate number hides a sharper story. NAB broke adoption down by industry, and the range is not a gentle gradient. Property services leads at 69%. Finance and insurance at 65%. Business services at 61%. Accommodation and hospitality at 50%. Then the drop: manufacturing at 35%, retail at 22%, transport and storage at 21%. Same economy, same tools available, three-to-one gap between the top and the bottom.

The industries at the top share three characteristics NAB identifies: high digital maturity, large volumes of structured data, and workflows built around forecasting, compliance, and process automation. A property management firm already running everything through a CRM has an obvious on-ramp. The AI features land in the software they already use.

The industries at the bottom face tighter margins, legacy systems, and what the report calls “fragmented supply chains.” Trades businesses — while not separately broken out in the NAB data — sit in this cluster. Their daily work involves mobile teams, physical assets, and scheduling complexity. Conditions where AI has proven applications, but where the adoption pathway is less obvious than toggling a feature in your CRM.

Here’s the problem with that logic. The industries facing the tightest margins are precisely the ones where small efficiency gains compound fastest. A transport operator running at 3% net margin who recovers two hours a day of dispatch time gets more proportional value from that gain than a property firm at 15% margins. The tools aren’t the bottleneck. The bottleneck is knowing where to point them.

Among SMEs already using AI, NAB found the top applications are marketing and sales (51%), operations and logistics (39%), and customer service (25%). The primary benefit: time back. Almost half say the biggest win is hours returned to the business or to the owner themselves.

This aligns with what we’ve tracked in earlier notes. Anthropic’s Economic Index showed Australian AI users over-index on admin and management tasks. MYOB’s Business Monitor reported 29% adoption — lower than NAB’s 42%, likely because MYOB asked about “dedicated AI tools” while NAB asked about “using AI” more broadly, a frame that captures built-in features in platforms like Office 365 and Xero. The gap between the two numbers may be the clearest evidence that AI is arriving inside existing tools faster than businesses recognise.

Sixteen per cent of SMEs told NAB that AI would not assist their business. The stated reasons: doubts about practical value, limited digital capability, concerns about data protection and workforce impact. Those reasons correlate with the industries at the bottom of the adoption table.

They’re legitimate concerns, not naive ones. But the regulatory timeline, the infrastructure investment, and the competitive pressure from higher-adopting industries all move in one direction. The 14% planning to adopt will shift the balance further by year’s end. The window to investigate while early adopters are still building their advantage is shorter than most business owners assume.

Pick one of the three use cases NAB identified — marketing, operations, or customer service — and run a 30-day test. Not an AI strategy. A single workflow.

For a trades business, that might be AI-generated quote follow-ups, dispatch optimisation, or automated after-hours call handling. We’ve covered all three in earlier notes. For a professional services firm already in the 61–65% adoption band, the question is different: are you measuring what it saves you? NAB found that the most common benefit is “time back.” Time back without measurement is indistinguishable from time wasted.

Key takeaways

Want to know where AI fits in your industry?

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