Australia Ahead On GenAI Curve, But Skills And Security Threaten To Curb Value

Australia is moving faster than global peers when it comes to implementing GenAI strategies and containerising applications, but skills shortages and security fears could hinder progress. These are the key Australian findings in the seventh annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index report, which were released today.

Australia’s GenAI momentum is striking. More than 80 per cent of organisations have a GenAI strategy in place, and 61 per cent are actively implementing it, six points ahead of the global average (55 per cent). Common use cases include customer support solutions (55 per cent) and code generation tools (48 per cent).

Yet, despite this rapid uptake, only 53 per cent of Australian respondents feel they have the necessary skills to support cloud-native apps/containers, a key ecosystem for GenAI applications. This is 10 points lower than the APJ average of 63 per cent. Further, 83 per cent say their infrastructure needs at least moderate improvement to support these workloads.

Michael Alp, managing director, Nutanix A/NZ said the findings highlight Australian organisations aren’t short on ambition, but there’s a growing gap between strategic intent and operational execution.

“The smartest move we’re seeing right now is organisations upskilling the engineers and developers already on the ground for the new cloud-native world. These teams then take their new cloud-native skills, along with institutional IT knowledge, to make smarter infrastructure decisions that keep innovation moving, not breaking,” Alp said. “It’s a faster, more sustainable way to build the future and overcome the pervasive local skills gap.”

Meanwhile, 100 per cent of surveyed organisations in Australia are at least in the process of containerising their applications, with nearly a third (31 per cent) stating all newly developed applications are containerised. This is significantly higher than the APJ average of 22 per cent.

AI is driving this containerisation surge with three quarters (75 per cent) of Australian respondents citing Gen AI applications as the most containerised applications in their organisation.

“There is a quiet revolution underway within Australian organisations and that revolution is the shift to cloud-native,” Alp said. “Containerisation is becoming the default, not the upgrade.That tells us it’s already embedded in how teams are thinking and delivering from day one.

“The flip side of this shift, as is clear in the data, is some organisations may struggle to drive their GenAI momentum forward, as they lack the skills, structure, and scale needed to turn all this progress into long-term performance.”

Key findings from this year’s Australian results also show:

• Data privacy action lags behind intent: While 98 per cent of Australian respondents agree security and data privacy is a top priority when implementing GenAI, only 27 per cent identify it as the most important data-related consideration once the work begins. This gap reveals a clear disconnect between stated values and on-the-ground priorities – organisations are talking-the-talk about privacy, but many are struggling to walk it. With privacy and security risks ranked as the top barrier to GenAI expansion, this misalignment could become a major stumbling block as projects scale.
• GenAI ROI expectations grow with time: While 38 per cent of Australian respondents expect GenAI projects to break even or incur losses in the first year, that figure drops to 28 per cent over the next one to three years. This suggests a shift in mindset among decision-makers towards a longer-term view of success, measuring ROI over multiple years rather than chasing short-term wins. It’s also a sign of maturity in how organisations are approaching GenAI, allowing room for experimentation, setbacks, and course correction, rather than abandoning projects that don’t deliver immediate results.
• MLOps platforms emerging as innovation enablers: More than half (54 per cent) of respondents say their organisation is using third-party machine learning operations (MLOps) to accelerate building, training, and deploying GenAI without having to build complex infrastructure from scratch. In doing so, organisations are creating faster feedback loops, reducing friction, and pushing GenAI solutions into production more quickly. But, it also suggests organisations are increasingly leveraging managed platforms to offset internal capability gaps.

For the seventh consecutive year, Nutanix commissioned a global research study to learn about the state of global enterprise cloud deployments, application containerisation trends, and GenAI application adoption. In late 2024, U.K. researcher Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,500 IT and DevOps/Platform Engineering decision-makers around the world. The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and geographies, including Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ), North and South America; Europe, and the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full seventh Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, here.

About Nutanix

Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organizations a single platform for running applications and managing data, anywhere. With Nutanix, companies can reduce complexity and simplify operations, freeing them to focus on their business outcomes. Building on its legacy as the pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure, Nutanix is trusted by companies worldwide to power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media @nutanix.

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