KPMG veteran Simon Benson takes on new Asia Pacific AI leadership role

Simon Benson, KPMG’s consulting partner-in-charge for energy, mining & property, has taken on a newly-created role as the professional services firm’s head of AI for the Asia Pacific.

Based out of Melbourne, the near three-decade KPMG veteran takes on his new regional AI lead role after heading the firm’s energy, mining & property consulting practice for the past year, before which he oversaw transformation and technology.

The firm’s Australian professionals are on quite a roll of late as to local and international impact, with former Oz boss Gary Wingrove to soon become global CEO and partner David Bradbury appointed chair of the government’s Board of Taxation.

Having studied psychology & neuroscience at the University of Manchester, Benson first joined KPMG’s audit team in London in 1998, before transferring to Perth four years later and being admitted to the partnership three years on. Prior to heading KPMG’s Asia Pacific technology consulting practice, Benson also helped establish and led the firm’s local alliances function.

With a focus on the government, retail, and consumer sectors alongside energy, mining, property, and construction, Benson all up brings more than two and a half decades of tech and large-scale transformation experience to the newly-created Asia Pacific head of AI role, including as the lead partner of KPMG’s Microsoft alliance for over ten years.

‘AI is a backbone of enterprise strategy’

“We are at a pivotal moment where AI is no longer just a ‘tech priority’ – it is the backbone of enterprise strategy,” Benson said. “At KPMG, our point of view is clear: AI’s true potential is unleashed only when coupled with human ingenuity. My focus will be on scaling our ‘Trusted AI’ framework to ensure that as we innovate, we do so with integrity, trust, and empowerment.”

Delving deeper, Benson described ‘integrity’ as moving beyond the AI hype to deliver measurable return-on-investment, ‘trust’ as ensuring ethics, safety, and transparency are embedded in every algorithm, and ‘empowerment’ to mean augmenting the capabilities of the firm’s professionals so that they can focus on high-value work such as creative problem-solving.

Benson also pointed to KPMG’s most recent ‘Keeping Us Up At Night’ survey of more than 270 senior Australian business leaders, which for the first time in eight editions found that AI and technological disruption and issues around ethics and use cases are now the primary concern for almost two thirds of local C-suite executives and board members across industries.

“It’s significant that leaders ranked AI-related issues as their top concern, and not just for 2026 but over the next three-to-five years,” KPMG’s Australian CEO Andrew Yates said of the results. “This is a clear recognition that AI is here for the long haul, and that businesses which get ahead of the game and embed it into their overall strategy now will be well ahead of those which don’t.”