Published on the 20/08/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

But what about the regulation needs?…

Australian leaders appear to have the greenlight from the workforce to accelerate AI adoption with a new report showing most workers are optimistic about AI adoption and the impact it will have in the workplace.

The Tech Council of Australia report shows 93 percent of the more than 2,500 surveyed believe AI will impact jobs by augmenting, rather than replacing, them, and that AI is already being used widely, with 84 percent of respondents in office jobs reporting that they use AI at work. Making a truth of a popular stereotype, younger male workers are most optimistic about AI and emerging technology, and those aged 19-24 are most bolshy about a future where most jobs are fully automated.

“A clear, flexible and interoperable regulatory framework will give developers and organisations the confidence to invest in AI.”

Damian Kassabgi, Tech Council of Australia CEO, says the report shows there is a willingness from the workforce to engage and augment their jobs with AI – highlighting the opportunity for organisations to accelerate AI adoption.

Of course, the Tech Council does represent the Australian tech sector, who have a vested interest in technology adoption. The report itself is sponsored by Datacom, Salesforce and Australian venture capital firm King River Capital, and is somewhat light on AI specifics, with much of it focused not on AI but on the impact of ‘technology’.

On that front, 71.5 percent of respondents were clear that technology has had a positive impact on their working lives over the past 10 years. Just 8.8 percent believed it had had a negative impact. The remainder said the impact had been neutral.

Perhaps surprisingly given the ongoing talk about the need for organisations to step up the upskilling initiatives to enable employees to move into AI with confidence, the survey found 73 percent of workers believe they can keep up with the pace of tech change in their workplace. And while younger workers were most confident – more than 80 percent of 25-34 year olds agreed, or strongly agreed, that they could keep up – even those over 55 were feeling capable, with 62 percent agreeing or strongly agreeing.

The confidence wasn’t so high among the self-employed, where just 53 percent felt capable of keeping up and part-time workers were also less likely to be so confident.

“This suggests opportunities for policymakers to support technology adoption, particularly among small and medium enterprises,” the report says.

On AI, specifically, in the workplace, five percent of survey respondents put themselves as advocates for AI in the workplace, 47 percent are ‘curious’, 25 percent are excited, 15 percent are concerned and six percent are ‘very concerned’. Managers and sales workers had the highest proportion of advocated.

Few believe automation is the likely outcome for their jobs with just seven percent believing their roles could be fully automated.

But if workers are apparently optimistic about AI, there are still some trepidations.

The survey, run by Qualtrics, highlights concerns around privacy, training and being involved in future decision making, with workers highly valuing clear information on personal data use, receiving training, engaging with leaders and having a say in and being involved in designing technology.

Transparency around personal data use was a top priority in the workplace.

Leadership responsiveness to feedback was also deemed important.

The release of the report came ahead of this week’s Economic Reform Roundtable in Canberra, where AI, and its potential regulation in Australia, has been a hot topic.

The TCA report found that just over half (51 percent) of all those surveyed believe the government understands new technologies well enough to regulate them – leaving 49 percent believing government officials don’t have the technology nous to regulate it effectively.

It’s no surprise that the report – released as it was so close to the Roundtable – would head into regulation territory.

The Tech Council has called for ‘fit-for-purpose, interoperable and risk-based regulatory frameworks’ that facilitate domestic AI investment, talent and innovation.

“A clear, flexible and interoperable regulatory framework will give developers and organisations the confidence to invest in AI for the future, so Australia is not just a net consumer of AI, but a world leader,” Kassabgi says.

It’s called for the government to work within current legislative frameworks, rather than developing new AI laws.

Tech Council of Australia president and co-founder of Atlassian Scott Farquahar recently called for the government to ‘fix outdated’ copyright laws in Australia to enable AI to train for free on creative content, claiming that current laws weren’t benefiting copyright holders and were harming investment in the sector.

Companies including Google and Meta are keen for a text and data mining exemption in copyright law to enable them to train their AI on all human works in perpetuity, without paying, with Farquahar saying it’s not theft, unless the AI is used to copy and repeat verbatim and AI’s use of the hoovered up content is ‘novel and new, not taking away any dollars from the people who created the work’.

“If AI and LLMs reproduce the exact article or book, that is a problem. But in most cases they don’t do that.

The TCA says fragmented or overly bespoke domestic rules around AI would raise compliance costs, hinder start-ups’ ability to scale overseas and deter critical investment.