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Monday.com touts AI as cure for productivity slump
The workflow management vendor showed off new AI capabilities to tackle burnout at its Elevate conference in Sydney while showcasing customer wins from Tennis Australia, Ray White and Freedom
“Modern work is not working,” Monday.com’s vice-president and general manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan, Dean Swan, told the company’s Elevate conference in Sydney, arguing that artificial intelligence (AI) is critical to reversing declining productivity.
Swan noted that burnout is rising to the extent that 61% of Australian workers are experiencing it, while labour productivity has fallen by 1.2% since 2022.
He told delegates that AI “will fundamentally change modern work,” recommending an optimistic perspective where the technology is applied for the benefit of individuals, teams and organisations.
According to Swan, Monday is looking to bridge the gap between AI’s capability and its practical impact by moving the platform from merely using software to manage work, to using it to actually do the work. To that end, the company recently introduced an Agent Factory, enabling users to build their own AI voice agents to democratise the technology.
Recently appointed chief revenue officer Casey George cited a McKinsey finding that the adoption of AI by sales teams improves their win rate by 30%.
George noted that his own team used Monday’s AI capabilities to build an agent to handle incoming sales enquiry calls. In the last three months, the agent handled 4,500 calls and made 450 appointments for sales staff, generating 220 leads.
“The best we’ve ever had,” George said, noting that potential customers also benefited from a 90% reduction in response time.
The company appears to be capitalising on the demand for efficiency. Its latest financial results show an improvement on the year-ago period, with nine-month net income rising from $9.4m to $42m.
At the Sydney event, three local customers detailed how they are using Monday to solve complex logistical and operational problems.
Tennis Australia
When Emma Hopkins, Tennis Australia’s director of precinct operations and logistics, took up her role in 2019, the operations side of the Australian Open (AO) was handicapped by the lack of a single source of truth.
“If you asked four people something as simple as ‘what time do the gates open on Friday?’, you would get four different answers,” she said.
Tennis Australia adopted Monday.com in 2020 to consolidate information in real time. The organisation now runs more than 40 project groups spanning security, cleaning, logistics and safety via consistent boards on the platform.
Hopkins noted that the event has a hard deadline: “This event is starting on the 12 January 2026, whether I like it or not. So we’ve got to be ready.”
A critical use case involves building hundreds of temporary structures at Melbourne Park. Previously, obtaining approval from the City of Melbourne involved managing around 10,000 documents via email, a process Hopkins described as a “complete nightmare”.
“We actually had basically a breakdown of the team on the eve of AO 2020,” she recalled. “We were opening the gates the next morning, and all of a sudden, we can't open our gates.”
The process is now handled entirely through Monday. Builders upload required documentation, such as structural drawings, wind ratings and fire engineering specifications, directly to the board. The City of Melbourne reviews the project and provides feedback within the platform, allowing builders to make changes instantly.
Once signed off, a place of public entertainment licence is issued. “Without that licence, we can't open our gates,” Hopkins said.
Ray White Group
Real estate giant Ray White Group is using the platform to bridge the gap between project management and content creation. The marketing team has integrated Monday with design platform Canva via Zapier to automate everyday tasks.
The company’s head of marketing, Todd Alexander, said the integration is “driving massive efficiencies”. For example, when a Ray White agent sponsors a local event, they simply enter their details, and a customised sponsorship logo is generated and sent to them automatically.
Similarly, the system automates the production of recruitment materials. When a new agent is hired, the studio enters their name and photo, triggering the generation of a PDF document showing how the recruit will appear in marketing materials.
The flagship application of this integration is the production of Ray White’s Luxury Homes magazine. Listings are filtered by price point to create a candidate list, which agents review. Data is then fed from Monday into Canva to handle page layout.
Alexander noted that the automation allows the team to produce 70 pages of layout in ten minutes. “Without Monday.com, we couldn’t do Luxury Homes,” Alexander said, noting that conventional production methods would be cost-prohibitive.
Freedom
Furniture retailer Freedom reported a 26-fold return-on-investment from its use of Monday CRM (customer relationship management) within its dropship operation, saving more than 8,100 person-hours in the first ten months.
Its head of dropship, Quentin Williams, explained that Freedom buys around 55,000 products wholesale from some 200 suppliers and handles the last-mile logistics. Unlike a standard marketplace, the selection is curated to preserve the brand; for instance, 30% of the retailer’s upcoming rug range will be dropship items.
However, rapid growth meant the company was “scaling chaos”. Freedom, which was already using Monday for work management, selected the vendor’s CRM product to simplify operations, with Williams noting implementation was easier than competitors HubSpot or Zoho.
The retailer uses the integration between the CRM and Microsoft Outlook to capture supplier communications and run campaigns for vendor compliance. The system tracks evidence regarding regulations such as the Western Australian ban on expanded plastic packaging or national standards for furniture stability.
Williams added that workflows now ensure staff capture information at every stage of a deal, rather than just the final outcome. “Systems don’t create clarity, people do,” Williams said, “but good systems enable people to create clarity.”
Read more about IT in Australia
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- Canva is training hundreds of staff on a low-code AI platform and agentic AI tools that are set to save around 30,000 person-hours this year and generate financial returns.
