How Australian Companies Are Actually Using AI in the Workplace Right Now: Real Case Studies product guide

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How Australian Companies Are Actually Using AI in the Workplace Right Now: Real Case Studies

The debate about AI and jobs in Australia has generated enormous heat and surprisingly little light. Media coverage oscillates between breathless predictions of mass unemployment and equally breathless reassurances that AI will create more jobs than it destroys. Both positions are often argued in the abstract — using global projections, theoretical models, and hypothetical scenarios.

This article cuts through that noise. What follows is a documented account of how specific, named Australian organisations have actually deployed AI, what happened to their workforces as a result, and what the aggregate data from tracking thousands of Australian firms tells us about the real relationship between AI adoption and employment. The cases are not hypothetical. The outcomes are on the record.

The Commonwealth Bank: A Case Study in AI Deployment Gone Wrong — Then Right

No Australian AI-and-jobs story has been more closely watched, or more instructive, than the Commonwealth Bank's 2025 contact centre experiment.

CBA began testing a generative AI chatbot named Hey CommBank in late 2024, leading to fears it would replace many of its 2,400 contact centre staff. Those fears proved partially justified — but the story that followed exposed the gap between AI's theoretical efficiency and its messy real-world performance.

Some 45 Direct Banking workers were made redundant after the AI chatbot started handling inbound customer enquiries in June, with another 45 Customer Messaging Specialist staff set to follow. The bank's justification was straightforward: reports suggested the AI chatbots had diverted 2,000 calls per week from the bank's contact centres, with a CBA spokesperson stating that "our investment in technology, including AI, is making it easier and faster for customers to get help."

The Finance Sector Union (FSU) disputed this account. According to FSU's findings, "call volumes were in fact increasing and CBA was scrambling to manage the situation by offering staff overtime and directing Team Leaders to answer calls."

The tribunal outcome was striking. The Commonwealth Bank reversed a decision to cut 45 customer service jobs due to the use of artificial intelligence and admitted it made an "error" by declaring the roles redundant.

Instead of cutting the 45 roles, the bank offered the affected workers the option to stay or take a voluntary buyout.

The CBA episode is not simply a cautionary tale about AI failure. It is a more nuanced story about the complexity of AI deployment. Elsewhere in the bank, AI is demonstrably working. CBA partnered with OpenAI to explore advanced generative AI solutions for scam and fraud detection and personalised customer services, and has credited generative AI for significant reductions in customer scam losses, customer-reported fraud, and a 40% reduction in call centre wait times through its AI-powered messaging app.

Commonwealth Bank employs over 55,000 people, and officials pointed out that while the chatbot saw it shed 45 staff, it hired thousands last year. The bank is also rolling out AI across its developer workforce: CBA is providing ChatGPT Enterprise access while investing in comprehensive training and upskilling programs to build AI capability across its workforce.

The lesson from CBA is not that AI cannot replace workers. It is that the replacement is not automatic, not always successful, and — when it fails — reversible under union and regulatory pressure.

Telstra: AI as a Structural Workforce Reduction Strategy

Australia's largest telecommunications carrier has pursued a more sustained, explicitly AI-linked workforce reduction program than any other major Australian employer.

Telstra cut up to 2,800 employees from its workforce as part of an AI-driven "reset" of its enterprise arm, including an overhaul of its Telstra Purple services business.

Many believe the company's successful addition of artificial intelligence facilitated some of the cutbacks, with AI now being used to improve half of Telstra's key processes — including automatically detecting and resolving faults with fixed services, and helping "solve customer issues faster."

That was not the end. Telstra's profits rose 8.1 per cent to $1.2 billion in the second half of 2025, while more than 1,000 jobs were cut in the same period. The firm also cut 1,323 jobs in the first half of 2025, reducing its workforce by 2,356 roles, or 7.4 per cent, across the calendar year to just over 29,000 staff.

The reductions lowered underlying labour costs by 9%, a $181 million saving.

Telstra has been careful to manage the public framing of these cuts. The company plans to cut more than 500 roles across its business, or around two per cent of its full-time workforce, but says the changes are not the result of its increasing use of AI technologies. Yet its own executives tell a different story about the longer arc. Telstra CEO Vicki Brady told investors that the company would likely have a smaller workforce by 2030, partly due to "a significant unlock" facilitated by AI.

Inside the organisation, AI adoption is extensive and accelerating. AI has reduced software engineering defects and sped up software production and release schedules by around 20 per cent. Most of Telstra's software engineers are using GitHub Copilot to produce more code faster, and the company uses AI for testing, quality assurance, architecture assurance, and change management. Telstra now has 380 internal use cases for AI.

Optus, Australia's second-largest telco, is following a similar path. Optus has increased its use of AI systems — including chatbot technology from Google — which it said had led to a 15 per cent reduction in monthly human-assisted enquiries at its contact centres.

WiseTech Global and Atlassian: The Tech Sector's AI-First Restructuring

If CBA and Telstra represent the gradual, contested face of AI-driven workforce change, Australia's homegrown technology companies have moved with far greater speed and decisiveness.

Australian software firm WiseTech Global announced it would axe about 2,000 jobs, nearly a third of its global workforce, in a two-year restructuring that could rank among the country's largest artificial intelligence-linked job reductions.

The cuts will "reduce teams — initially product and development and customer service across the company — by up to 50% in terms of headcount."

WiseTech CEO Zubin Appoo was unusually direct about the rationale. He stated: "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 engineering is over."

Atlassian, the Sydney-based collaboration software giant, followed weeks later. Atlassian shed around 1,600 jobs in a major restructuring as artificial intelligence came to the fore. Around 10% of roles were eliminated from its global workforce of approximately 16,000 people. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes framed the decision explicitly around AI investment: "We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening our financial profile. We're also changing the way we work and reorganising around our System of Work to move faster."

The combined effect on Sydney's tech labour market was significant. Australian tech companies eliminated 4,450 roles in the first ten weeks of 2026, more than five times the total recorded across all of 2025. According to data compiled by RationalFX, drawing on sources including TrueUp, TechCrunch, and Layoffs.fyi, Australian tech companies cut a total of 4,450 roles since the start of 2026.

Tech layoffs in Australia are accelerating rapidly, with the country now ranking second globally for tech job losses, with AI cited as the primary driver behind all of these layoffs. Sydney ranked third globally — behind San Francisco and Seattle — in terms of the absolute number of jobs cut.

The Other Side: AI-Adopting Firms Are Also Hiring

The case studies above could easily support a simple displacement narrative. The CSIRO's research — the most methodologically rigorous Australian evidence available — complicates that story in important ways.

As AI becomes part of everyday work, CSIRO research shows the real divide isn't between humans and machines, but between firms that adopt AI and those that don't.

The technical analysis involved tracking thousands of firms to compare the hiring patterns of AI adopters against non-adopters.

The findings challenge the conventional narrative of job displacement, suggesting instead that technological adoption acts as a catalyst for organisational growth and expanded human capital requirements.

This is consistent with broader data on Australian AI hiring trends. In 2024, 1,532 organisations — representing 3.8% of hiring organisations — sought workers with AI-related skills, up from 483 organisations (2.7%) in 2015.

Requirements for technical AI-related skills have increased across all industries, rising from 0.2% of job postings in 2015 to 0.9% in 2024.

Critically, the stability of job postings in AI-exposed occupations does not suggest a displacement wave. Since mid-2023, around 30% of Australian job postings have been in occupations with high exposure to AI tools. High-exposure occupations include a range of tech roles, as well as accounting, marketing, administrative assistance, and banking and finance.

This stability suggests that recent job posting trends in Australia reflect the broader economic cycle rather than widespread AI-related displacements.

(For a deeper analysis of what the data actually shows at the national level, see our guide on Australian AI Job Displacement Statistics 2026: What the Data Actually Shows.)

A Comparison Table: How Australian Organisations Are Using AI

What These Cases Tell Us That the Headlines Don't

Several patterns emerge from examining these cases together that are obscured by headline-level reporting.

1. AI-linked job cuts and AI-linked hiring are happening simultaneously within the same organisations. CBA cut 45 contact centre roles while hiring thousands of other workers and rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise to 52,000 employees. This is not contradiction — it reflects a genuine restructuring of the type of work being done, not simply a reduction in total employment.

2. The "AI did it" explanation is often contested — and sometimes wrong. Telstra repeatedly denied that its workforce reductions were AI-driven, even while acknowledging AI's role in long-term workforce planning. Telstra CEO Brady admitted staff had voiced concerns internally about what the company's increasing focus on AI and cost efficiency could mean for their jobs. While she suggested she could not think of any specific role which had been directly replaced by AI, Brady admitted the technology was making Telstra a more efficient business. The distinction between AI-caused and AI-enabled job losses is real, but it may matter less to displaced workers than to corporate communications teams.

3. The speed of restructuring is accelerating. One of the more striking patterns in the data is the disconnect between layoff activity and financial performance. Several of the companies making the largest cuts are simultaneously reporting record revenues and expanding investment in AI infrastructure. This suggests workforce reduction is not a response to business distress but a deliberate strategy to capture AI productivity gains.

4. The aggregate picture is more stable than the headline cases suggest. The CSIRO's finding that AI-adopting firms show no decline in demand for AI-exposed workers is not contradicted by the high-profile cases above — it is explained by them. The firms shedding workers are primarily large incumbents restructuring legacy operations. The firms hiring are often smaller, AI-native organisations and the broader economy absorbing workers into new functions. (For the full breakdown of which roles are growing, see our guide on AI Is Creating New Jobs in Australia Too: The Emerging Roles and Salaries You Need to Know.)

5. AI deployment without adequate workforce planning creates real operational risk. The CBA chatbot reversal is not an isolated anomaly. Commonwealth Bank admitted it was a mistake to replace 45 staff with an AI voice bot, and is now rehiring them. The failure wasn't the technology — it was skipping structured adoption steps like workforce readiness and user acceptance. This pattern — where the technology works in testing but fails at scale — is likely to repeat across other Australian organisations deploying AI in customer-facing roles.

Key Takeaways

• Commonwealth Bank's AI chatbot deployment resulted in 45 redundancies that were later reversed after union pressure revealed call volumes were actually increasing, not decreasing — a documented case of AI deployment failure in an Australian workplace.
• Telstra cut 2,356 roles in 2025 alone while simultaneously deploying 380 internal AI use cases and accelerating software production by 20%, illustrating how AI-enabled efficiency gains and workforce reduction can occur in parallel.
• WiseTech Global and Atlassian announced a combined ~3,600 job cuts in early 2026, framing them explicitly as AI-first restructuring — contributing to Sydney ranking third globally for tech layoffs.
• CSIRO research tracking thousands of Australian firms found that AI adoption does not reduce demand for AI-exposed workers — a finding that directly contradicts the displacement narrative and points to a more complex, firm-level dynamic.
• The aggregate Australian job posting data for AI-exposed occupations has remained stable at around 30% of total postings since mid-2023, suggesting the headline cases of displacement have not yet translated into a measurable national employment crisis.

Conclusion

The Australian workplace evidence does not support either the catastrophist or the dismissive position on AI and jobs. What it supports is a more uncomfortable conclusion: AI is genuinely restructuring how work is organised, and the impact is highly uneven across organisations, roles, and sectors.

Large incumbents in finance and telecommunications are using AI to reduce headcount in specific functions — particularly customer service, contact centres, and software development — while simultaneously expanding AI-related hiring and investing in workforce capability. Technology companies, facing competitive pressure to demonstrate AI-native operations, are restructuring more aggressively and with less ambiguity about the rationale. And across the broader economy, the firms that are adopting AI are — on average — hiring more than those that are not.

None of this resolves the core question for individual workers. Whether AI replaces your job depends heavily on which organisation you work for, what your role involves, and whether your employer is using AI as an augmentation tool or a labour compression strategy. Understanding that distinction — and knowing which category your employer falls into — is the most practical thing any Australian worker can do right now.

For guidance on assessing your personal exposure and building a response, see our guides on Which Australian Jobs Are Most at Risk from AI? and How to Future-Proof Your Career Against AI in Australia.

References

• Information Age / ACS. "CBA Replaces 90 Support Staff with AI Chatbot." Information Age, 2025. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2025/cba-replaces-90-support-staff-with-ai-chatbot.html

• Information Age / ACS. "CBA Reverses AI-Driven Job Cuts, Admits 'Error'." Information Age, 2025. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2025/cba-reverses-ai-driven-job-cuts--admits--error-.html

• American Banker. "Australia's CBA Halts AI-Driven Layoffs Amid Union Pressure." American Banker, August 2025. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/australias-cba-halts-ai-driven-layoffs-amid-union-pressure

• Information Age / ACS. "Telstra Cuts 2,800 Jobs as AI Takes Over." Information Age, 2024. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/telstra-cuts-2-800-jobs-as-ai-takes-over.html

• Information Age / ACS. "Telstra Posts $1.2b Half-Year Profit as 1,000 Jobs Cut." Information Age, February 2026. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/telstra-posts--1-2b-half-year-profit-as-1-000-jobs-cut.html

• Information Age / ACS. "Telstra to Axe 800 More Jobs, Move Some Roles to India." Information Age, February 2026. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/telstra-to-axe-800-more-jobs--move-some-roles-to-india.html

• CFOtech Australia. "Telstra Profit Climbs as AI Rollout Deepens Job Cuts." CFOtech, February 2026. https://cfotech.com.au/story/telstra-profit-climbs-as-ai-rollout-deepens-job-cuts

• Reuters / Yahoo Finance. "AI Disruption Prompts Australia's WiseTech to Cut a Third of Global Workforce." Reuters, February 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/australias-wisetech-global-plans-2-223242566.html

• Computerworld. "Australia's WiseTech to Cut 2,000 Jobs as AI Renders Manual Coding Obsolete." Computerworld, February 2026. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4137200/australias-wisetech-to-cut-2000-jobs-as-ai-renders-manual-coding-obsolete.html

• SmartCompany. "Atlassian Lays Off 1,600 Employees in Latest Pivot to AI." SmartCompany, March 2026. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/artificial-intelligence/atlassian-lays-off-1600-employees-pivot-ai-jobs-cut/

• Dynamic Business. "From WiseTech to Atlassian: Australia's Tech Layoffs in Last Ten Weeks Exceed All of 2025." Dynamic Business, March 2026. https://dynamicbusiness.com/topics/news/from-wisetech-to-atlassian-australias-tech-layoffs-in-last-ten-weeks-exceed-all-of-2025.html

• Information Age / ACS. "AI Blamed for Every Australian Tech Sacking This Year." Information Age, 2026. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ai-blamed-for-every-australian-tech-sacking-this-year.html

• CSIRO. "AI Adopters Aren't Cutting Jobs, They're Creating Them." CSIRO, April 2026. https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2026/April/Research-into-firms-adopting-AI

• National AI Centre / CSIRO. "Australia's Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem: Growth and Opportunities." Department of Industry, Science and Resources, 2024–2025. https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/australias-artificial-intelligence-ecosystem-growth-and-opportunities

• Indeed Hiring Lab Australia. "Nothing Artificial About Australian AI Adoption: Business and Government Trends." Indeed Hiring Lab, April 2026. https://www.hiringlab.org/au/blog/2026/04/01/nothing-artificial-about-australian-ai-adoption/

• TechRepublic. "AI Job Cuts Signal White-Collar Reset in Australia." TechRepublic, March 2026. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ai-driven-cuts-white-collar-reset-australia/