By Brad Ferris · 26 September 2026
On 24 September the Australian Financial Review published an opinion piece by Microsoft ANZ president Jane Livesey, I run Microsoft Australia. Here's the AI number keeping me up at night. It puts two numbers side by side. Microsoft's own data ranks Australia 11th in the world, with 40.7 per cent of working-age Australians using generative AI in June against a global average of 18.8 per cent. Treasury, meanwhile, reports that fewer than one in ten Australian businesses would call their own adoption of AI significant.
Read those together and a common diagnosis falls over. The usual story in mid-market businesses is that Australians are cautious, that staff need convincing, that adoption is a training problem. The staff have moved. Somewhere between the individual and the organisation, the momentum stops.
Livesey describes a first wave of adoption, counted in licences, pilots and hours saved. Most operators will recognise it. A handful of people use a chat tool every day. Someone in finance has a prompt that reconciles supplier statements in half the time. Someone in sales drafts every proposal with it. The leadership team knows this is going on in a general way and could name perhaps a third of it.
Very little of that shows up in the numbers the business runs on. The hours saved are real, and they get absorbed into each person's week without anyone changing a process, a role or a target. The capability belongs to the individual. When that person leaves, it leaves with them. When they get something wrong, nobody else is positioned to notice.
That is the shape of the gap. Individual use grows on its own momentum. Organisational use needs somebody to decide which work changes, write the new method down and answer for the result. In a business of 50 to 300 people, that job usually has not been given to anyone.
Ethan Mollick made a related argument in The Overhang on 18 September. Current models can already do weeks of human work when properly guided, he writes, yet their capabilities are barely being used, because human systems and processes move slowly. On that reading, the scarce input in most businesses is direction: somebody deciding what the tools should be pointed at.
The largest workplace software vendor appears to have reached a similar view about where value sits. Bloomberg, reported via Business Standard, says Microsoft is merging the consumer and workplace versions of Copilot into one product aimed at corporate customers, ceding the personal chatbot market to OpenAI, Google and Meta, and letting users edit Word and Excel documents from inside the assistant. Whatever you make of the product, the direction of travel is clear: the value is in work the business already does, inside software it already runs.
That should be reassuring for an owner who feels behind. The discovery work has largely been done by your own people, for free, on their own initiative. What is missing is the step that turns their habits into the company's method.
The headline of Livesey's piece is a different statistic again. Only 1 per cent of Australians fully trust AI, and 44 per cent have little or no trust in it, which leaves the country using the technology more than most while trusting it less than almost anyone.
High use combined with low trust is the profile of quiet, unsanctioned adoption. People reach for a tool that saves them time, keep it to themselves, and check the output only as carefully as their own judgement demands. That is the risk most owners worry about: something wrong goes out under the company's name, and nobody knew AI was involved.
Bringing that use into the open, with a documented method and a named reviewer, deals with the risk and the trust problem in the same motion. Staff trust a process they can see others checking. Customers trust a business that can explain how its work was produced.
The part of Livesey's argument worth taking to your next leadership meeting is the simplest. Australia is not short of access to AI, and neither is your business. Your people have already found where it helps them. The job left for the leadership team is deciding which of those discoveries the business will own.
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