While technology adoption is high, Australia’s business leaders have yet to prioritize factors critical for long-term resilience.

The pandemic ended Australia’s fairytale three-decade run of being immune to global crises. As the economy reemerges from the disruption, businesses find they are less than future-ready in critical areas.

Even as tech adoption surges, most have yet to see significant value from their investments. Sustainability, despite appearing to be a top priority, has not seen much meaningful action. That might change, as the recent federal election results showed, addressing climate change is no longer a nice-to-have.

Meanwhile, talent cultivation efforts have failed to ease strained talent pipelines. For Australia’s business leaders, now is the time to build on their technological prowess by strengthening their talent pipelines and embedding sustainability into core operations.

In our work to define what it takes to be future-ready—and how close businesses are to reaching a future-ready state—Cognizant commissioned Economist Impact to conduct a survey of 2,000 senior executives from across industries and geographies, as well as create a future-ready benchmarking tool (see our full report, “Ready for anything: what it means to be a modern business”).

Our own analysis of this data underscores what executives in Australia and globally need to do now to prepare.

Source: Economist Impact Survey 2022

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The views and opinions expressed in this report are those of Cognizant and do not necessarily reflect the view and policies of Economist Impact. Data presented is from an Economist Impact executive survey, commissioned by Cognizant, conducted in early 2022.