How agentic automation will reshape Australian industries in 2025
In recent years, Australian organisations have been transformed by Generative AI. However, 2025 will usher in a new era with the rise of agentic AI and agentic automation, delivering unprecedented efficiency, collaboration, and technical capability.
Agentic automation empowers AI agents with intelligence and judgment to autonomously understand, plan, and act — addressing complex tasks beyond the reach of software robots. This will drive faster innovation, more responsive customer interactions, and greater enterprise productivity.
Unlike Generative AI's content creation and Q&A capabilities, agentic automation leverages advanced machine learning to achieve human-like intelligence and decision-making. It transforms how organisations operate, enabling seamless interactions between technology, people, and legacy systems.
Why Agentic Automation is a game changer for Australia
Agentic automation supports Australia's goals of boosting productivity and growing local industries by addressing skills shortages and using plain language prompts to solve complex problems. It learns from outcomes, self-adjusts, and ensures continuous improvement, enabling AI agents to assist human colleagues, or independently handle tasks, freeing people up to focus on strategy.
This transformative capability spans industries and is already being adopted in sectors like customer service, manufacturing, mining, finance, technology, and healthcare.
Australian industries leading Agentic Automation adoption
In 2025, there will be five key industries that are likely to lead Australia's adoption of agentic automation:
1. Manufacturing and mining: Australia's manufacturing and mining sectors have long been technology innovators and the lynchpin to industrial revolutions. This is likely to occur again as Australian companies advance their smart manufacturing initiatives, spurred by the current government's Future Made in Australia policy. Manufacturers and mining companies will achieve significant productivity gains and return on investment through agentic automation's ability to monitor and assess vast amounts of streaming data and then decide, plan and execute actions in real time. This will enable manufacturers and mining companies to autonomously manage supply chains, inventory levels, equipment maintenance, demand forecasting (including for just-in-time manufacturing), quality assurance and logistics planning. It will also support manufacturers and mining companies with meeting new regulatory requirements such as mandatory environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting that came into effect in January 2025.
2. Retail: Australian retailers are continually seeking new ways to engage customers and drive customer loyalty in a competitive market. Agentic automation can super charge hyper-personalised sales and marketing initiatives based on customer interests and behaviours.
3. Finance and professional services: Agentic automation can manage a broad range of finance and professional services activities, such as collecting, analysing and developing financial reports, autonomously reviewing and processing loan and insurance documentation, and monitoring for fraud and compliance.
4. Government: A key challenge for Australian government agencies is managing the vast amount of citizen inquiries that their call centres receive every day. Equipped with real-time data, context and the right demand and behavioural predictive models, AI agents have been able to resolve 14% more issues each hour.
5. Healthcare: Agentic automation has broad uses across healthcare, from scientific research and pharmaceutical production through to managing patient information. For example, AI agents can design and conduct scientific experiments, analyse results and formulate hypotheses to expand the capacity of research laboratories and speed innovation.
Transforming business models and the workplace
The evolution to agentic automation demands reimagining operating models, redefining jobs, upskilling workers, and redistributing tasks between humans and virtual agents.
Effective orchestration is vital to this transformation. Platforms like UiPath enable process coordination across the entire enterprise, moving beyond single-platform automation to achieve scalable solutions. Orchestration must support multiple agents — human and virtual — whether working independently or collaboratively, ensuring seamless integration of their actions and decisions.
Without robust infrastructure, controls, and orchestration, agentic automation cannot scale accurately or sustainably. Similarly, a workplace lacking clear roles and processes risks inefficiency and disorder.
To address this, Australian organisations need to build AI-driven ecosystems where agents, robots, and people can collaborate effectively under structured governance. These ecosystems will emphasise transparency, control, and active oversight.
In 2025, leading enterprises will prioritise not just adopting and scaling agentic automation but also embedding ethics, governance, and compliance into their automation strategies to align with evolving regulations.
Also, human workers will still remain the driving force behind implementing AI visions, unlocking a new potential for sustainable growth and enhanced productivity.
