Ross Stitt sees a work revolution ahead in Australia from AI adoption that could create significant problems. Are businesses, unions, and politicians up to the task? Or will we have to look to AI agents for the solutions?

Is AI an existential threat or an economic saviour? It’s too early to tell but there are plenty of advocates on both sides of the argument.

Last week was an opportunity for the AI pessimists in Australia to sound the alarm.

WiseTech Global, an Australian-headquartered software company, announced the cutting of up to 2,000 jobs as part of its ‘AI transformation program’.

CEO Zubin Appoo was explicit about the impact of AI on the company’s business - 

Software development has experienced its most significant shift in decades. I am prepared to say this clearly: the era of manually writing code as the core act of software engineering is over.

Not good news for software engineers.

The Australian Financial Review described the move as ‘Australia’s first AI jobs bomb’.

The threat of AI to ‘Software-as-a-Service’ (SaaS) companies has been roiling markets for months. Another Australian software company, Atlassian, has seen its share price tumble 70% in the last twelve months, a loss of tens of billions of dollars in market cap. 

And what’s bad for SaaS companies is bad for their staff. 

Two days after WiseTech’s announcement ASX-listed Block Inc (the company that purchased Australian company Afterpay for nearly $40 billion) revealed that it would be letting go 4,000 of its 10,000 staff. The CEO, Jack Dorsey, attributed the reduction to AI –

Something has changed. We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. And that's accelerating rapidly.

Some have accused Dorsey of ‘AI-washing’ i.e. using AI as an excuse for cost-cutting.

The employment implications of AI go well beyond the software sector. Last week the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASB’s parent company) laid off 300 staff and announced a $90 million, three-year Future Workforce Program, its plan for an ‘AI-ready workforce’.

CBA CEO Matt Comyn said, ‘businesses and workers have to prepare for a future where AI plays a bigger part and the way work gets done is different’. He stressed that ‘Australia has to get really good at adopting this technology and whatever follows it’.

Unsurprisingly, the Finance Sector Union was quick to complain that CBA had not consulted properly with employees. Its national secretary Julia Angrisano called for ‘stronger protections when AI or new technology is introduced in the workplace and genuine support for workers to retrain and redeploy into other areas’.

Australian unions, which are generally more powerful than their kiwi counterparts, are taking a keen interest in AI. They argue it should be a mechanism for making employees more productive rather reducing employee numbers.

Productivity has become a hot political issue in Australia. In January the unemployment rate decreased to 4.1% and the economy is running at close to full capacity. But Australia has hit a growth ceiling. It now struggles to grow per capita GDP without putting upward pressure on inflation which in turn pushes up interest rates.

Everyone recognises that the only answer is increased productivity. But successive governments have failed to achieve that.

AI is one obvious solution to the productivity dilemma, but the fear, particularly for politicians and unions, is job losses.

Research by Randstad, a global recruitment company, describes ‘60% of Australian employers already reporting that AI has successfully increased their workforce productivity’. But Randstad’s Workmonitor Report 2026 reveals that half of employees ‘believe the adoption of AI in the workplace will mainly benefit companies, not them’.

The emergence of AI as a major factor in employer/employee relations in Australia comes at a time when ‘working from home’ is also a point of contention. The state of Victoria is currently introducing a right for all employees who can do their job from home to do so for at least two days a week.

There’s clearly a risk in such a policy to the extent that it makes an employee less attractive to their employer. It may give the employer an even greater incentive to ‘replace’ that employee with AI.       

The challenging feature of AI is the speed of its development.

The latest shift – from ‘generative AI’ to ‘agentic AI’ – is the most dramatic so far. The former is all about generating content while the latter involves ‘AI agents’ that use reasoning and planning to undertake complex tasks with minimal human involvement.

It’s the ability of AI agents to write personalised software code that’s seen investors dump software companies. But these agents obviously have the capacity to displace legions of other jobs currently performed by humans, including white collar management and professional roles.

WiseTech is just the beginning. What lies ahead is a work revolution that could create significant problems. Are businesses, unions, and politicians up to the task? Or will we have to look to AI agents for the solutions?  

*Ross Stitt is a freelance writer with a PhD in political science. He is a New Zealander based in Sydney. His articles are part of our 'Understanding Australia' series.