Australian and New Zealand Technical Leaders Say Data Overhaul Is Necessary for AI Strategies to Succeed

Up to 83 per cent of Australian business leaders say they’re under growing pressure to drive business value with data. Yet Salesforce’s new State of Data and Analytics report reveals their biggest hurdle is still incomplete, out-of-date, or poor-quality data. 

The chasm between businesses’ data demands and their data realities becomes more problematic in the agentic AI era. While business leaders are eager to use AI for insights and productivity, their technical counterparts worry a new approach to data and analytics is needed. In fact, 88 per cent of Australian and 89 per cent of New Zealand data and analytics leaders say their data strategies need a complete overhaul before their AI ambitions can succeed. 

To close the gap, savvy technical leaders are focusing on the fundamentals: timely, context-rich data, stronger governance and zero copy architectures that unlock trapped, distributed data regardless of where it resides. On their journey to becoming agentic enterprises, they’re also embracing emerging solutions like agentic analytics, that bring reliable insights into the flow of work.

This report should deliver a wake up call to Australian and New Zealand business leaders: AI success hinges on data preparedness.

Justin Tauber, GM of Agentic Technology, Trust & Adoption at Salesforce ANZ

“Our businesses recognise the need to update and overhaul data strategies before AI can succeed, and there is clear recognition that too often a businesses most valuable insights are trapped in inaccessible silos,” continued Tauber. 

“This is why it’s pleasing to see significant momentum to resolve these challenges, with 60 per cent of Australian organisations already adopting zero copy data integration to unlock trapped data. By providing these unified, trusted data foundations, we are enabling Australian and New Zealand businesses to ensure their AI efforts move confidently from pilot to powerful, high-impact business execution.”

Key data from the report: 

Existing data foundations strain to support business ambitions.
As many as 58 per cent for Australian leaders and 64 per cent of those in New Zealand describe their organisations as data-driven. But just as many – up to  60 per cent of Australian data and analytics leaders –  say their companies struggle to drive business priorities with data, exposing a gap between data maturity perceptions and reality:

• Less than half of Australian (43 per cent) and New Zealand (47 per cent) business leaders say they can reliably generate timely insights.
• Nearly half (48 per cent) of data and analytics leaders in Australia say their companies occasionally or even frequently draw incorrect conclusions from data with poor business context. These concerns are more pronounced (64 per cent) in New Zealand.
• Incomplete, out-of-date, or poor-quality data remains the number one factor preventing organisations from being truly “data-driven.”

Poor data derails path to becoming an agentic enterprise.
AI has quickly become the top data priority in 2025, up from seventh in priority order for Australian data leaders in 2023. It’s quickly proving to be the biggest stress test for existing data foundations, with 76 per cent of data and analytics leaders feel pressure to implement AI quickly. 

Yet 41 per cent lack full confidence in the accuracy and relevance of their AI outputs, likely because of the disconnected, out-of-date data it draws from. While 87 per cent of data and analytics leaders theoretically agree that AI’s outputs are only as good as its data inputs, their reality is a bit more complicated; 24 per cent estimate their organisational data is untrustworthy, with 85 per cent reporting that they’ve experienced inaccurate or misleading AI outputs.

It’s a slightly different story in New Zealand, with leaders saying they feel under less pressure (62 per cent) to implement AI quickly as compared to their peers in Australia, but they are less confident (47 per cent) in AI’s  accuracy and relevance. That’s pushed AI capabilities up to third on the list of top data priorities, just after strengthening security and compliance.

Businesses are feeling the consequences of training AI on faulty data foundations.

• 85 per cent of data and analytics leaders with AI in production say they’ve experienced inaccurate or misleading AI outputs, compared to 95 per cent for New Zealand. 
• More than half of data and analytics leaders – 56 per cent in Australia and 67 per cent in New Zealand – at companies training or fine-tuning their own models report they’ve wasted significant resources doing so with bad data.

87% of data and analytics leaders in Australia believe a strong data foundation is the most critical factor for successful AI.

“The lessons learned from earlier waves of AI adoption provide a blueprint for companies to become agentic enterprises where human employees and intelligent AI agents work together,” explained Michael Andrew, Chief Data Officer at Salesforce. “Trusted, unified, and contextual data is the key that unlocks everything. For organisations ready to execute at scale, this is the moment to shore up data foundations to confidently scale AI to its full potential to deliver real value and ROI.”

Even high-quality data is useless if it’s trapped.
More than 9 in 10 Australian data and analytics leaders believe unified data is key to meeting customer expectations. At the same time,  trapped data remains an ever-growing challenge skyrocketing from last on their list of challenges two years ago to a top five hurdle today. The issue is exacerbated by application sprawl: the average enterprise uses 897 applications, and only 29 per cent are connected. This severe fragmentation scatters data across silos, making it difficult or impossible to access. 

As a result, Australian data and analytics leaders estimate that 18 per cent of their company’s data is siloed, inaccessible, or otherwise unusable, versus 22 per cent in New Zealand. Perhaps more concerning is 75 per cent of Australian respondents, and 84 per cent of those in New Zealand, believe their most valuable business insights reside within this inaccessible data. 

The ramifications are widespread, with over 8 in 10 ANZ data and analytics leaders citing reduced AI capabilities, obscured customer views, reduced personalisation, and missed revenue opportunities as a result

To meet business demands, technical leaders revisit how data is accessed, used, and secured.

To mitigate trapped data challenges, 60 per cent of Australian organisations and 49 per cent in New Zealand, are adopting zero copy data integration, an approach that makes it possible to access data that is sitting in multiple different databases at the same time without having to move, copy, or reformat anything.

These changes are paying off. Australian companies using zero copy are 27 per cent more likely to deliver superior customer experiences and 173 per cent more likely to succeed with AI initiatives than those without zero copy. In New Zealand, companies using zero copy are 138 per cent more likely to have fully connected customer data sources and 207 per cent more likely to succeed with AI initiatives than those without.

Natural language interfaces, like agentic analytics, can also help solve for data literacy and access bottlenecks, with 62 per cent of Australian respondents saying that  translating business questions into technical queries is prone to error, a figure that is much higher (85 per cent) in New Zealand. There is clear consensus among Australian (95 per cent) and New Zealand (97 per cent) business leaders, who say they’d perform better if they could ask data questions with natural language.

Governance and security protocol updates are also needed to address increasingly complex data demands, with only 44 per cent of data and analytics leaders in Australia having established formal data governance frameworks and policies, compared to 49 per cent in New Zealand. Up to 94 per cent of leaders in both countries agree that AI demands entirely new approaches to governance and security.

“As companies move towards becoming agentic enterprises, true transformation happens when data and AI move in lockstep, “ said Andrew. “Strong data foundations give AI the context it needs, and AI, in turn, helps leaders unlock the full potential of their data. The organisations treating data and AI as an integrated strategy are the ones who will successfully move from pilots to execution to see AI deliver significant impact.”  

Go Deeper:

• Read the full State of Data and Analytics report
• Discover how Data 360 can unlock the full value of your data across the enterprise
• Learn how Tableau Next powers analytics for the agentic era
• Watch a video explainer series on how the Data 360 Zero Copy Partner Network unlocks your data
• Watch the 2025 Dreamforce keynote for free on Salesforce+

Methodology:

Data in this report are from two double-anonymous surveys conducted from June 27 through August 13, 2025. The first survey generated 3,800 responses from analytics and IT decision makers from 18 different countries across North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. The second survey generated 3,852 responses from line-of-business leaders from the same countries. More details can be found in the report. Cultural bias impacts country-level survey results.