Who we are
The UTS Business School’s AI in Business Research Venture Hub brings together a cross‑disciplinary network of over 60 business school researchers to collaborate with industry on timely, high‑impact questions shaped by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. The Research Hub utilises UTS Business School researchers’ expertise across accounting, finance, information systems, management, marketing, and supply chain to focus on three connected themes: understanding the financial and human value of AI, how workforces and consumers are changing behaviours as AI becomes embedded in everyday decisions, and the governance and privacy implications that follow.
The Research Hub is designed to be a public, industry-facing gateway for organisations seeking research collaboration, insight, and evidence-based solutions on AI in business. We are particularly interested in collaborating with industry partners to empirically address the challenges firms face as AI becomes embedded in business operations, and we actively encourage industry involvement on firm, employee, and customer related topics to ensure our research tackles questions that matter in practice.
Why engage with us?
AI is one of the most significant business investments of our time. Stanford research shows global AI investment reached US$1 trillion between 2020 and 2024, and Gartner forecasts that figure to reach US$2.5 trillion by 2026 alone. The pace is accelerating — and the competitive divide between organisations that are capturing AI's value and those that are not is widening with it.
Billions are being spent globally, but the gap between investment and outcome remains wide. Current reports indicate that most organisations are not seeing returns. For example, PwC's 2026 Global CEO Survey found that 56% of companies report no financial return from their AI investments and MIT research puts the number even higher, finding that 95% of businesses see no measurable bottom-line impact from generative AI. For Australian organisations, the stakes are even higher. Australian AI investment sits well outside the top 10 globally, meaning local firms are behind. However, as international competitors begin to extract real productivity and revenue gains from AI, Australian businesses risk falling further behind not due to their ambition but because they lack access to rigorous, independent evidence on what actually works.
The problem is not the technology – which continues to amaze in its innovativeness. Instead, most organisations are navigating AI adoption with advice from vendors who have a stake in the answer or consultants working from frameworks not grounded in empirical research. Without independent evidence, organisations cannot distinguish genuine AI strategy from expensive experimentation.
The AI in Business Research Venture Hub exists to close that gap.
We bring together cross-disciplinary researchers from the UTS Business School, including internationally recognised researchers and educators. Critically, we speak the language of business. Our focus is on the implementation, consequences, and value of AI in organisations. We help organisations understand what AI means for their customers, their employees, their decisions, their financial performance, and their risk profile.
Engaging with the Hub gives your organisation access to:
- Independent, credible research that internal teams and consultants cannot produce
- Evidence-based answers to your specific AI challenges, at no cost to your organisation
- Insights that directly improve performance and highlight potential revenue opportunities, from researchers who understand the financial and organisational contexts in which AI needs to deliver
- The option to remain fully confidential, or to build your profile as a thought leader in AI adoption
- A network of over 60 researchers across every major business discipline, with access to global academic partnerships
If your organisation is investing in AI and wants to understand what is actually working — and why — we want to hear from you.
Research projects/themes:
Value of AI in business: examining whether and how AI creates financial and human value (and where it fails to deliver). A small sample of research interests include:
- AI use and adoption across and throughout the firm (in accounting, finance, information systems, management, marketing, and supply chain)
- AI’s fiscal and employee effectiveness across tasks, firms, industries, managerial levels, and countries
- AI’s impact on innovation development, business model transformation, and performance evaluations
Behavioural adaptation: how workforces and consumers are adjusting their decisions and behaviours as AI becomes mainstream. A sample of research interests include:
- AI augmented strategic decision making in organisational and customer contexts
- AI’s differential impact on customer and employee behaviours
- AI’s positive and negative effects on overall workforce and individual skillsets
Governance, privacy, ethics and responsibility: practical implications for policy, controls and trust as AI use expands. A sample of research interests include:
- Ethical AI governance and policies to improve innovation and economic productivity
- AI’s impact on trust, transparency, and privacy
- AI’s impact on climate risk, carbon footprints, regulatory compliance, collusion, and public infrastructure
Past/future events:
AI in Marketing Summit
The AI in Business Research Venture Hub collaborated with IAB Australia and ACAM to create an interactive summit that brought together leading marketers, academics and technologists to unpack the latest AI trends, challenges and opportunities, with a focus on marketing applications. This complimentary event was sold out within 24 hours and was designed exclusively for marketing leaders who were interested in exploring how AI is transforming creativity, customer behaviour, and the future of work. Speakers included Rhys Williams, Kellyn Coetzee, Ori Gold, Kathryn Illy, Gai le Roy, Rochelle Tognetti, and Douglas Nicol, who work at a number of leading firms such as Google and Zenith Media, in addition to several of our AI in Business Research Venture Hub academics, while attendees ranged from C-level executives to managers working daily on AI in marketing.
A key feature of the Summit is its focus in jointly addressing the challenges firms and customers through proposed research collaborations between industry and academics. The collaborations from the initial AI in Marketing Summit are now in progress and offer unprecedented opportunities for exclusive research to benefit the individual firms and the general public.
Due to its success, the AI in Marketing Summit is expected to be a continual semi-annual event in the future. Further, we aim to replicate this Summit for other business areas in the near future.
Sydney Behavioural Science Summit
This interactive global summit series co-organised with Bescy and Diversifi brought together leading academics, government policy-makers, and industry practitioners to unpack the latest AI trends, challenges, and opportunities, with a focus on behavioural applications. Speakers included Dr Jason Collins, Dr Alex Gyani, Professor Ben Newell, and Dr Mallory Avery, with attendees representing a range of major organisations including CBA, IAG, Macquarie, Woolworths, and both the NSW and Federal Governments.
A key feature of the Summit was its focus on jointly addressing the challenges firms and customers face through proposed research collaborations between industry and academics. Through structured "working lunches," delegates collaborated to produce a defined list of knowledge gaps and strategic opportunities, ultimately shaping an industry-informed research agenda. The collaborations initiated helped strengthen strategic partnerships between UTS and key industry players, advancing the practical application of behavioural science in the technology sector.
Due to its success, the summit positions UTS as a central hub for the international behavioural science community and showcases the Lab’s leadership in high-impact research areas at the critical intersection of technology and society. We aim to continue leveraging these strategic partnerships to host similar trusted forums in the future.
Executive Roundtables
The AI in Business Research Venture Hub is currently hosting / interesting in hosting several small-scale executive roundtables. These intimate discussions are designed for executives to discuss current trends and best and worst practices with AI implementations, with an end-goal of trying to determine optimal approaches for research on AI in business related topics. Prior roundtables have occurred in Sydney and in New York City, with potential roundtables available in other cities as well.
Site Visits, Training and AI Literacy
AI in Business Research Venture Hub researchers can offer presentations, site visits, and bespoke training programs designed for firms to learn directly from leading academics and researchers.
Investing in AI tools without investing in the people using them is one of the primary reasons organisations fail to see returns. The gap between AI investment and AI value is a human capability gap, and closing it requires more than a single workshop or a generic online course. Organisations that succeed with AI build literacy across their entire workforce, from the boardroom to operational staff, so that AI outputs are understood, and acted on effectively.
The Hub's researchers are uniquely placed to support this. Drawing on the same curriculum developed for UTS Business School's postgraduate programs, including subjects covering AI strategy, applied AI competency, data literacy, governance, and ethics, we design and deliver training that is grounded in the latest academic evidence and immediately relevant to the business context of each organisation.
We have delivered AI and data literacy programs to a range of private and public sector organisations of varying sizes, tailoring content to the audience, the industry, and the specific challenges the organisation is navigating. Engagements can range from executive briefings and keynote presentations to multi-day immersive programs and ongoing capability-building partnerships.
All programs are delivered in the language of business, not technology, accessible to non-technical staff, relevant to executives, and designed to drive measurable organisational outcomes.
Leadership
The AI in Business Research Venture Hub is being spearheaded by Associate Professor Ofer Mintz. Ofer is an internationally recognised researcher focusing on trying to solve major problems industry faces, which has led him to be the first Australian-based scholar to win the Marketing Science Institute’s global award for research most important to practice and theory. Ofer has presented invited research talks on five continents, published research in leading academic and managerial journals, such as the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of International Business Studies, and been on the faculty or had visiting appointments at the Wharton School, Tel Aviv University, and Louisiana State University. In addition, Ofer has provided vaccine marketing to policy makers in the USA and Australia, judged the Australian Junior Space Design Competition, and been an invited delegate on an Australian Innovation Trade Mission led by the Tesla Chairwoman to the USA that engaged with leading Silicon Valley and Seattle region firms. You can learn more about Ofer.