AI productivity benefits could reduce house prices, immigration: KPMG’s digital boss

AI’s productivity benefits could give Australia the boost it needs, reducing the amount of jobs which go offshore and keeping revenue onshore, says KPMG’s digital boss.

KPMG Chief Digital Officer John Munnelly

Artificial intelligence’s productivity benefits could reduce the cost of housing in Australia and reduce the nation’s dependency on immigration if its broad deployment is done correctly, says the man overseeing AI at KPMG.

But, Australia’s lack of AI education and the failure of many companies to implement the technology ethically threatens to derail those benefits, says John Munnelly, KPMG’s chief digital officer.

Australians are behind poorer neighbouring countries when it comes to AI education, Mr Munnelly said, adding, “I don’t think anybody in Australia would know where to go to learn about AI”.

“I think we’ve got an opportunity to do more. The government can certainly help with that and the corporates and the educational institutions also have a big role to play,” he said.

AI’s broad benefits were only beginning to be felt in the corporate world, Mr Munnelly said, having agreed that hyperscalers had overpromised the benefits of generative AI. In its infancy in 2023, “it was a chat tool”, he said.

“The sort of tooling that we’re rolling out now in corporates is changing and changing drastically. The chat tool was cool, it was really interesting and people found it amazing, but it was just a chat tool and we’ve moved beyond that.”

In 2025, the focus was now on multi-agent systems or multi-agent orchestration which allowed multiple AI-powered digital agents to work together to perform tasks similar to how a human would, including review and rewrite processes.

Mr Munnelly said if Australia gets it right on AI, it would improve productivity and reduce the country’s reliance on other nations including India.

“Ultimately the sort of work that we would have traditionally offshored to India … we’ll no longer need to offshore as much. We’ll keep the revenue here in Australia,” he said.

“To me, this has to be it. This has to be the opportunity for us to drive productivity without having to drive immigration”

“Obviously digital labour will be the supplement, not necessarily immigration-driven growth. And then I think that drives productivity, it helps with house prices because we’re not bringing in lots of extra people into the country.”

AI could replace much of the digital labour Australia offshores to countries like India. Picture: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP

However, the Australian government needed to lead better on AI and orchestrate educational programs with other corporate and education institutions.

Many corporations were yet to roll out proper frameworks for the use of AI which created a great risk to companies with staff who used approved software, referred to as shadow IT, he said.

“A lot of people use (generative AI) tools to find a recipe on the weekend, thinking it was amazing and then thinking they will use the tools at work tomorrow, not really realising the impact it potentially has,” he said.

“(They’re) not realising that the data is moving offshore and (they’re) not realising that the data is now ingested into some tech vendor’s large language model.”

KPMG had to ramp up education and use of its own generative AI tool, called KymChat, as a replacement to ChatGPT in the workplace, particularly as more university graduates joined its ranks. About 16 per cent of its staff who have joined KPMG in the past two years were recent graduates.

“This year we’ve taken on a cohort of graduates who’ve had two years at university using ChatGPT and so they don’t know another way,” he said.

“They’re used to performing their tasks using tools they’ve been allowed at university, and rightly so. They’re coming to our business, and they ask, ‘what do I use? How do I do this?’.”

Originally published as AI productivity benefits could reduce house prices, immigration: KPMG’s digital boss