Last updated: 31st Mar 2026
After years of dire warnings, have the robots finally come for our jobs? Four companies with a strong presence in Australia announced layoffs in February and March –
WiseTech Global, Commonwealth Bank, Block (formerly Square), and Atlassian.
Yet, the evidence for a widespread AI jobs takeover is weak right now.
The Australian labour market is showing resilience (unemployment is at a low 4.1%).
The US jobs market is softer but still steady, with the jobless rate at 4.4% and slow job growth.
Increased automation is obviously having an impact – and will likely keep having an impact.
But there’s a gaping divide between what generative AI (GenAI) models are potentially capable of, and how they’re actually being used.
Why?
Why AI Is Becoming The Perfect Excuse For Layoffs.
The people selling, or investing in, AI tools have been among the loudest voices shouting that human workers will soon be obsolete.
For example, the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, made news at the start of the year when he claimed that most professional tasks “will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Alongside its US$13B investment into OpenAI, Microsoft sacked over 15,000 employees in 2025 – citing AI-driven efficiencies.
Atlassian, meanwhile, has reasons to be nervous.
The company is at risk from AI-native competitors.
It’s been building its own GenAI solutions – and spent almost $1 billion last year to acquire an AI web browser that will be integrated into its products.
In March 2026, the company slashed 1,600 jobs, ostensibly because AI had changed “the mix of skills we need,” and “the number of roles required”, according to CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.
One Atlassian employee who spoke anonymously to the Sydney Morning Herald questioned that narrative, saying “I personally think we overhired, and [Cannon-Brookes is] hoping the stock price goes up as a result”.
Job cuts by payments company Block this year that saw 40% of its headcount go were also criticised for so-called ‘AI-washing’.
What Is AI-Washing?
Using AI productivity gains as an excuse to cut jobs – when operational bloat was the root cause. The former looks like innovation. The latter? Mismanagement.
AI expert and Associate Professor at The Wharton School, Ethan Mollick, said Block’s job cuts were dubious because AI tools were still so new and “we have little sense of how to organise work around them.”
“Is Block’s announcement just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing?” was the question posed by former Block employee Aaron Zamost in an op-ed for The New York Times.
Stanford University Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who studies workplaces and modern business management, said in response to the op-ed:
University professors like Pfeffer must be taken with a pinch of salt, as decades in academia are not a substitute for real executive business experience.
Yet he is right that improving margins by adopting AI signals that a company is innovative. Going places. Part of the zeitgeist.
How Close Is AI To Replacing Jobs?
No bones about it, agentic AI tools are powerful. And they’re rapidly imporving.
But the fact that AI tool is capable of doing something, isn’t the same as being able to reliably replace a real worker.
The widely-referenced METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) task-completion time horizon graph shows AI agents’ capabilities are advancing exponentially.
Such measures show a trend, but have limitations.
- The graph is based on an AI model’s ability to complete self-contained coding tasks – that don’t require prior context – with 50% reliability.
- The ‘time horizon’ relates to a model’s performance in comparison to how long certain tasks took a human coder to finish (which obviously varies).
So, the latest Claude model, for example, cannot independently code software for 10 hours.
Instead, it has a 50% chance of successfully performing tasks that might typically take humans 10 hours.
The CEO of Anthropic said one year ago (March 2025) that by now (March 2026) AI could be writing “essentially all of the code” in the software we use.
While some companies, including Microsoft and Anthropic, have been able to offload substantial amounts of coding duties to AI, the pace of adoption outside big tech is nowhere near as rapid.
Recent research by METR also shows that using AI actually slows down the work of software programmers due to the added time spent prompting and reviewing the tool’s outputs.
Not just a little slower either —-19% slower.
Another study that analysed real work activity of 164,000 workers, over more than 443 million hours, found AI was making work more complicated and intense.
More time spent emailing or in business management tools. More hours are worked on weekends.
Important!
That leaves less opportunity for deep-flow state work: AI users’ average daily time spent on focused work dropped by 9%.
The Future Of Work May Not Involve Humans.
It seems clear that knowledge workers will be disproportionately impacted by AI compared to blue-collar workers. Computer-based work is more ripe for automation.
It’s no wonder that many companies are experimenting with AI or using tools like Microsoft’s Copilot.
Yet these AI programs remain small-scale and often fragmented across one or two business functions.
There are plenty of barriers to adoption:
- More sophisticated ‘agentic’ AI tools are not free. The companies creating these tools need to recoup their costs, but not every business will see the value in organisation-wide subscriptions.
- Scaling internally-built AI projects across a whole organisation also requires a significant investment in maintaining technology stacks. Only large corporates with an innovation agenda are acting now.
- Leveraging any kind of AI tool and its outputs successfully will still hinge on informed, well-trained staff (who’ll need to continually up-skill as tech evolves), which creates an ongoing cost for businesses.
A 2025 report from MIT Media Lab showed:
- 95% of organisations are getting zero return on their investment in AI.
- 60% had evaluated custom enterprise-wide AI tools, but just 5% deployed them.
The report also found limited layoffs from GenAI.
Letting AI entirely takeover essential functions that shape a company’s success is also risky.
Global fintech Klarna learnt the hard way.
It replaced 700 customer service roles with bots in 2024, but backtracked a year later because the AI alone wasn’t good enough.
CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in May 2025 that Klarna would be looking to hire more humans to handle complex enquiries:
Even when the tools have matured, AI taking over jobs isn’t necessarily the most cost-effective way forward.
Or what’s best for society, which could see governments step in to regulate.
A recent report found that automation and offshoring of roles to AI could have a cumulative net negative impact on Australia’s GDP – whereas using AI to augment the current workforce could add over $1 trillion to our economy.
McKinsey’s North America Chair Eric Kutcher, said in January 2026 he thinks organisations will embrace hybrid AI-human workflows that will require fast learners and judgement-based roles.
How To Make Your Job AI-Proof.
A recent viral post by CEO of AI writing assistant software platform HyperWrite, Matt Shumer, urged people to “get proficient” at AI with urgency, because the latest models are ready to take over almost every white collar job within “one to five years.”
Respected author of ‘Everybody Writes’, Ann Handley responded to Shumer’s thesis, to say, “Do not panic.”
The timeline is murky, and Shumer has vested interests, she argues.
She thinks the exponential curve of AI job displacement will likely hit a wall – “not because of technological limits, but because real-world adoption is messy and human-shaped.”
She acknowledges we’ll all face the imperative to learn AI skills, but suggests the timeline will be longer than 2-5 years as everyone grapples with change.
Shumer may be right when he says that the people who will thrive will be those who become “comfortable with the pace of change itself.”
Jody
Pat says:
Hi Irene, Amazing article. Really helpful. Thanks.
Martin says:
Helpful reading. Especially for those who just have come to Australia and try to apply for a suitable job.
Karma says:
Nice to go through and understand basic requirements for writing cv
Alex says:
Hello
Could you please help me for for write CV and cover letter thanks
Alex 0472837500
Steven McConnell says:
Alex, a couple of ideas:
– I suggest that you don’t make your mobile public.
– Please refer to our blogs – there are plenty of resume writing guides available.
– If you’d like us to write a resume for you, it’s certainly possible. However, do note that we’re a premium brand and our prices start at $2,500.
– If that’s outside your budget, that’s perfectly understandable. We can refer you to a resume writing service that’s competent and affordable. Simply submit an enquiry via the contact page and we’ll help you out.
Thanks!
Steven