Australia Post CEO Paul Graham: Invest in education and training to boost productivity

Paul Graham says improving Australia’s skills base and digital literacy will help enhance productivity.

Australia Post CEO Paul Graham. Picture: Nicki Connolly/NewsWire

CEO SURVEY 2025: FULL COVERAGE

Economy

How would you rate the momentum of the Australian economy as we head into 2025? Official forecasts have Australia trimming interest rates from the first half of calendar 2025, is that consistent with your view? What are you seeing around inflation in your own business?

It’s good to see inflation has gradually been easing and if this trend continues, hopefully it will provide the RBA with the capacity to reduce interest rates and provide households with some much-needed cost-of-living relief. The exact timing of any cuts is hard to predict, but a moderated inflation rate in 2025, coupled with some interest rate relief, can only be a good thing for Australian households.

We are maintaining stringent cost discipline as well as the ongoing simplification of our business to help mitigate the inflationary impacts on our cost base. We’re focused on providing the best service to our customers in the most cost-efficient way to balance service, cost and financial sustainability.

Cost pressures are a constant challenge for most industry sectors and ours is no different. We are always looking to improve the way we operate so we can continue providing highly competitive services to our customers.

Outlook

What excites you heading into 2025? Are you likely to increase, hold steady, or trim your investment spend?

Our parcels business continues to grow despite intense industry competition, particularly large, multinationals and an ever-growing number of new, smaller entrants. While the two-speed nature of our business continues to increase, we are focused on adapting to meet our customer needs.

We are continuing to invest in our parcels business to deliver what our customers want and in ways that suit them, such as increasing our electric delivery vehicle fleet to support our team member safety and environmental sustainability, as well as innovative technology to improve efficiency.

Reform

As we move into an election year, in your mind, what’s the single biggest lever that can/should be used to lift Australia’s competitiveness or productivity? This could be across any area from labour market, tax reform, training or other areas to encourage investment.

Australia Post has been focused on modernising our business, especially as the needs of our customers and the community have evolved. Despite the advancements in AI and robotics, we need to continue to build human capital and increase productivity, so investing in education and training is critical. Improving Australia’s skills base in areas like creative thinking, problem solving and teamwork, along with digital literacy will all help to enhance Australia’s productivity.

Geopolitics

Will a Donald Trump presidency have a potential impact on your business or sector (tariffs or streamlined regulation)? Does geopolitics drive a bigger part of your decision-making?

The international political landscape does play into the Australian economy and our business. We continue to work with our international counterparts, including the United States through the Universal Postal Union (UPU), to achieve positive outcomes for our customers.

A core part of our business is delivering for our customers and communities, which includes senders and receivers both in Australia and abroad. Customers look to us to support them navigate cross-border e-commerce opportunities for Australian businesses and consumers. Where changes are made by governments, we look for ways to adapt our logistics network to ensure we continue to deliver for our customers while complying with local regulations. We work closely with other international operators as we do this.

People

Has your organisation’s approach to flexible working – including working from home – evolved during the year. Is this likely to change further into 2025?

The vast majority of our team are frontline workers, who don’t have the option of working from home, as they are out in the community delivering parcels and mail, processing parcels or serving customers in our retail outlets. Our hybrid policy has remained the same, which is three days per week in the office for our support team members.

In Melbourne, the move this year to our new purpose-built, state-of-the-art support centre in Burnley to reduce our office costs has collaboration and wellbeing at the core of its design. Being connected and collaborating in-person more consistently will ensure we continue to provide the same high-quality support to our frontline teams and continue to deliver on our Post26 strategy.

Technology

Where is your organisation along the AI journey – is it in the developmental stage, or are you now using the technology at scale across your business? If so, are benefits matching the promises?

We’ve been using traditional forms of AI for tasks such as forecasting parcel volumes and estimating delivery dates, and to enhance safety in our facilities. More recently we’ve started to use generative AI to assist in handling simple customer inquiries in our contact centre and to help our software engineers write code. We are relatively early in our journey but have developed a holistic Data & AI Strategy to ensure we can safely and effectively adopt this technology at scale and align our investments to our strategic priorities.