NAB chief executive Andrew Irvine has urged the country to resolve three fundamental productivity challenges in order to resume a 100-year "economic miracle" where each generation has enjoyed greater prosperity than the previous one.
Mr Irvine listed the challenges as spiralling energy costs holding back manufacturing growth and economic dynamism; a housing crisis limiting immigration and the dream of home ownership, and jobs growth dominated by low-productivity positions in the public service and care economy.
"You need the care economy because we're getting older, but we've got to have less civil servants and enable businesses to hire because right now we suffocate them with red tape," he told a NAB Business Summit.
"The problem is we've been talking about (these issues) for 10 years.
"We've got to stop talking about it, push into it and start acting."
A panel including Mr Irvine, new Business and Private Banking Group Executive Andrew Auerbach, and Corporate and Institutional Bank Group Executive Cath Carver shared insights with the bank's customers at the Wednesday summit, two weeks after the Albanese Government's economic reform roundtable.
Mr Irvine said artificial intelligence was a possible solution to Australia's weak productivity.
The technology, he said, would be as consequential as previous industrial revolutions ignited by electrification, automobiles, mobile telephones and the internet.
"We're talking about something that is going to change how we live and work, profoundly. That's a fact," he said.
"Of course, at NAB, we're going to take advantage of it or we will not exist as a company in 50 to 100 years.
"Companies like Kodak and Blockbuster go away if they don't take advantage of big things. Every big industrial wave destroyed lots of jobs and created lots of new ones. That's the nature of creative destruction.
"But what I will say, and this is really important, is that AI is not going to take away people's jobs. People using AI are going to take the jobs of people not using AI. We've got to get people to learn and not have fear."
While some challenges remained for businesses, including tariffs, cashflow constraints and global volatility, the NAB chief said green shoots were starting to appear across the economy.
The lower cash rate had brought some relief to households, and the Reserve Bank was carefully steering the nation to the hoped-for soft economic landing.
Confidence was also building; it was just a matter of everyone harnessing it together.
Mr Auerbach was also optimistic about the outlook, saying his observations were validated by NAB's survey of business conditions.
"In fact, our confidence indicators are actually at levels we haven't seen since 2022, so I think there's just an enormous opportunity in front of us as we think about all of this geopolitical uncertainty.
"I believe Australia can be a great beneficiary of that."
As head of the corporate and institutional division, which banks large corporate customers, Ms Carver said some businesses and asset managers were shifting their focus a little from the US.
Australia, she said, was benefiting from some of those capital flows, to the extent that demand was outstripping supply in the bond market.
"At the same time, we've got big pension funds from Canada and Europe coming into Australia and spending billions, whether it's in agri or renewables," Ms Carver said.
"So as sentiment slightly improves or stabilises at a high level, I think we'll see more of that de-risking out of the US because there's actually a lot about Australia that makes it very attractive compared to other countries around the world.
"We're far more stable with a centrist-type government, and if you go and talk to clients in Europe there's a lot to be worried about.
"How do they fund decarbonisation, or the cost of energy or access to energy? There's no growth in the UK, and there's the government and regulatory environment. It's a tale of many different stories depending on where you have your business."
After 11 weeks in the job, Mr Auerbach said the business bank needed to "dramatically simplify" to make it easier for bankers to do their work.
"AI is a huge part of that," he said.
"As we think about process simplification, we're already deploying workflow that simplifies the amount of time it takes to get to (a yes decision).
"So a big part of my job and a big part of how we work is simplification. It's a core part of what we're doing in the company."
