Australian organisations have poured record sums into AI tools over the past two years, yet the share of leaders who believe their company is genuinely future-ready has fallen from 10 per cent to just 6 per cent, according to new benchmarking data from LHH and The Adecco Group. The finding, presented at a Sydney panel hosted by LHH, signals that spending alone cannot close a widening gap between technology adoption and the organisational redesign needed to make it pay off.
"Somewhere along the way, something got lost in translation," James McIlvena, managing director for Australia, New Zealand and Singapore at LHH, told the room. The problem, he argued, sits between individual productivity gains and real organisational value creation. Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index found 58 per cent of AI users now produce work they could not have completed a year earlier, and 66 per cent spend more time on higher-value activities. Yet the same research showed that culture, leadership support and talent practices have more than twice the impact on outcomes than individual effort alone.
Why measurement keeps failing
Amanda Veldman, chief people officer at Equip Super, said the measurement challenge is genuine. "It's actually really hard to measure productivity," she said. Her fund reports AI usage to the board quarterly but is still working out how to track genuine impact. "I don't really know that it's really seeping into your fundamental processes," she added - a symptom of work redesigned around the tool rather than the outcome.
Anatoli Kovalev, vice president for ANZ and ASEAN at Akkodis Academy, framed the adoption pattern as a J-curve. Efficiency dips before it rises because the technology arrives before the skills, processes and redesigned roles that make it useful. The shift now under way, he said, is from automation to augmentation. "The much bigger opportunities in value creation for organisations is augmenting the human potential," Kovalev said, pointing to IKEA's decision to reskill 8,500 support staff into interior design roles rather than cutting headcount.
AI is not the strategy
Both panellists warned against treating AI as a strategy in its own right. "AI should not be their strategy. AI should be the tool that supports your strategy, that supports your business," Kovalev said. Veldman was just as direct: "It's an enabler. It's not the business strategy." Equip Super is introducing a performance-culture survey alongside its usual engagement survey to get what she called a "real-time litmus test" of which parts of the business are adapting and which need more support.
On experimentation, Veldman described a new innovation lab being built into the fund's Melbourne office, designed to give staff space to test AI use cases with a member-experience lens rather than what she called "AI for AI's sake." Kovalev said leaders must create "a safe environment to potentially make a mistake within boundaries," rather than pushing staff toward personal, ungoverned tools out of fear of formal guardrails. For HR leaders navigating these shifts, AI for Human Resources has become a core capability rather than a peripheral concern.
Managers shift from delegation to quality assurance
Frontline managers face the sharpest change. "They're not delegators of tasks anymore. They're actually QA," Veldman said. She now asks her direct reports to explain the reasoning behind AI-assisted work before she signs off. Kovalev framed the coaching challenge as teaching staff to interrogate their own use of the tools: "It's having a better view of what the tasks are and what you can augment and what tasks give you joy and what tasks don't."
Audience questions kept returning to a harder problem: if routine, entry-level tasks are increasingly automated, where will future leaders learn the fundamentals? In a follow-up interview, McIlvena rejected the idea that entry-level roles will disappear, but said the burden now falls on leaders to fill the gap AI leaves behind. "As AI becomes more accessible, technology itself is no longer the competitive advantage," he said. "The organisations pulling ahead are those investing equally in leadership, workforce capability and the uniquely human skills that AI cannot replicate: curiosity, critical thinking, judgement and human connection."
Why this matters for HR leaders
The panel made clear that the future of work is not being shaped by AI alone. It is being shaped by organisations that combine technology with human capability. For HR professionals, that means the immediate mandate is not another tool rollout. It is redesigning roles, coaching managers to oversee AI-augmented work, and building the culture that lets experimentation happen safely. The organisations pulling ahead are the ones treating AI as an enabler of strategy - and investing at least as heavily in the human systems that determine whether the technology delivers anything at all. For senior HR leaders building these capabilities, an AI Learning Path for CHROs provides structured guidance on bridging strategy and workforce readiness.
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