Datacom Group

Some of the best and brightest names locally and internationally talking about AI, agents of change.

And right now, our first guest of the day is Lou Compagnone, who is the Director of Artificial Intelligence for Datacom, working out of Melbourne.

That's right.

And you nailed the pronunciation of my surname.

leaned into it.

I drew all of my pasta knowledge to the fore.

So part of Lou's remit is to, she led Datacom's digital transformation and AI journey, heavily involved in ethics, guardrails, and I assume that goes into your customer work as well.

So today I'm talking about the results from our AI index survey.

So technology is great, but it comes back to how people use it and how you integrate it into daily life.

I spent 18 years at Datacom, which was awesome because I got a really great grounding in technology and business.

And I spent most of my time working with large commercial organizations, construction, manufacturing, retail, those kind of businesses.

And then three years ago, I had the opportunity to move to South Base Group and joined the South Base business.

Artificial intelligence tools appear to be firmly embedded in Kiwi workplaces, but most are yet to adopt it company-wide.

New research from Datacom finds 91% of organisations now use some form of AI, up from 87% in 2025.

It also shows around 80% are still only in the exploratory or implementation stages of AI maturity.

Datacom AI director Lou Campagnoni says businesses need to think more holistically about where the opportunities are.

We're

looking at an entire end-to-end workflow rather than just thinking about sticking a tool that's generalist into the organisation and hoping that you'll get productivity results.