Australian Businesses Favor AI for Back-Office Tasks Over Software Building

Anthropic’s customers in Australia, who have been among the leading adopters of the company’s Claude artificial intelligence (AI) model, tend to use the tool for back-office tasks, the company’s country head said Monday (Aug. 24), Bloomberg reported.

Speaking at a National Australia Bank Ltd. event, Theo Hourmouzis, general manager for Australia and New Zealand at Anthropic, said the share of Claude usage made up of basic tasks such as invoicing, inventory management and general administration is 5.8% in Australia, compared to 4.7% globally.

“When I look at our usage here in Australia, I think we over-index the back-office, pragmatic work,” Hourmouzis said, according to the report.

Australian users under-index on the coding use of Claude. This suggests there is an opportunity for business users in the country to use Claude to build software that meets their needs, Hourmouzis said, per the report.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Wholesale Writes the AI Playbook: How Goods Firms Are Scaling Intelligence Across the Enterprise” found that among wholesale firms, the three most widely adopted AI tasks are contract and proposal generation, security monitoring and threat detection, and revenue recognition and close support.

“These tasks aren’t flashy consumer-facing applications but core business processes (legal, financial and security) that have historically required specialized human expertise,” the report said.

Anthropic and its partners announced May 13 that its Claude for Small Business plugin would bring new AI-powered capabilities to tools commonly used by small businesses, including Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Microsoft 365, PayPal and QuickBooks.

“Claude for Small Business runs inside the tools owners already rely on, like QuickBooks, PayPal and HubSpot, and takes on the work that piles up after hours, like planning payroll, chasing invoices or kicking off a marketing project,” Anthropic Co-Founder and President Daniela Amodei said at the time in a press release.

PYMNTS reported May 14 that examples of the ways small businesses are using AI agents include a marketing agency founder who stopped spending hours each week generating invoices and chasing payments after adopting the technology, and a coffee roaster’s chief operating officer who found operational problems he didn’t know existed.