The week AI came for Australian jobs

It was 1am when Natalie MacDonald’s phone lit up. The email’s subject line told her everything she needed to know before she’d read a word of it. After seven years at LinkedIn, building its audience across Australia, mentoring colleagues, and flying to India for a women-in-tech conference just weeks earlier, her role was being eliminated.

The reason: a company-wide restructure driven by investment in artificial intelligence.

MacDonald, 36, and a mother of two, had returned from parental leave just six weeks prior. Her baby had been hospitalised with a serious infection the week before she went back to work. Now she was sitting on the floor of her children’s bedroom at 3am, messaging former colleagues around the world, trying to grasp the scale of what was happening.

“I woke my partner up and just said: ‘I’m losing my job in the morning’,” she tells this masthead.

MacDonald’s story would be devastating enough on its own. But this week it became something more: the human face of what is rapidly emerging as a tipping point for AI-driven job losses across corporate Australia.

Within just a few days, a cascade of announcements from some of the country’s biggest companies has made it impossible to treat AI displacement as a theoretical problem, a future risk to be managed with training programs and reassuring talking points.

This week made clear that it is here, now, and accelerating.

A week like no other

The dominoes fell fast. On Tuesday, WiseTech Global – one of Australia’s most valuable technology companies – announced it would slash 2000 jobs, nearly a third of its workforce, across product development and customer service. Chief executive Zubin Appoo didn’t try to dodge questions about whether AI was to blame. He pointed to the launch of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in late 2025, and subsequently OpenAI’s latest models, as a tipping point that had fundamentally changed what the technology will do for software companies.

Investors loved it. WiseTech shares surged nearly 11 per cent on the news, and J.P. Morgan estimated the cuts could deliver up to $150 million in savings. The analyst note’s title: “Cutting a leaner path to FY28.”

The same day, the Commonwealth Bank confirmed 300 job cuts, timed alongside the launch of a $90 million “Future Workforce Program” designed to retrain staff for roles the bank believes will survive the AI era: financial crime, digital risk and data engineering.

CBA chief executive Matt Comyn has been preparing for this moment since an embarrassing episode last year, when the bank blamed 45 contact centre redundancies on AI before walking the claim back weeks later. This time, the messaging was more sophisticated: cuts paired with investment, and displacement paired with redeployment. “We recognise there’s a lot of uncertainty around AI and we’re trying to replace that with transparency and opportunity,” Comyn told the ABC’s 7.30 program on Wednesday.

“There are many things that humans can do that currently the technology can’t do. But it can do some things remarkably well. And it’s the pace of change that I think’s really important.”

Then, on Friday morning (Australian time), Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block – the parent company of Square and Afterpay – told shareholders it was becoming a “smaller, faster, intelligence-native company” and axing nearly half its global workforce, with some 4000 jobs to go. Australian employees of Block are not immune from the cuts, though the company did not say how many local staff would lose their jobs. Dorsey argued that a significantly smaller team using AI tools could already do more and do it better, predicting that within the next year, the majority of companies would reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.

And at Telstra, the Communications Workers Union this week accused the telco of “offshoring by stealth”, warning that its plans to shift technology development and AI delivery capabilities to foreign contractors would put local skills and the personal data of millions of Australians at risk.

The Australian cuts did not happen in a vacuum. The same week, a viral research note from little-known US firm Citrini Research shook global markets with what it called a “scenario, not a prediction” – a doomsday timeline in which AI agents gut software companies, trigger mass white-collar unemployment, and set off cascading defaults in private credit and mortgages. The scenario ends in mid-2028 with unemployment above 10 per cent and protesters camped outside OpenAI’s offices.

Speculative as it was, markets flinched. The S&P 500 dropped more than 1 per cent on Monday, with companies specifically named in the report – Uber, Mastercard, American Express, DoorDash – losing between 4 and 6 per cent. A Federal Reserve governor felt compelled to push back publicly, insisting AI would not rapidly displace workers.

Still, the fact that a Substack post could rattle the world’s biggest sharemarket tells you something about where investor psychology sits right now.

Globally, AI is tearing through workplaces. Amazon has confirmed 16,000 corporate cuts. Dow Chemical is slashing 4500 roles as it automates with AI. Autodesk is shedding 1000 jobs to redirect spending to its cloud and AI platform. HP expects to eliminate up to 6000 positions by 2028.

The fear is real

New data from Randstad’s Workmonitor survey found that one in three Australian workers now believes their job will disappear due to AI within five years. The same proportion says their job prospects have worsened compared with a year ago. Millennials and Gen X are the most worried, and almost half of all workers surveyed believe AI adoption will primarily benefit companies rather than employees.

Perhaps most telling is the training gap. Less than half of Australian workers say they’ve received training on the AI tools reshaping their roles. But 56 per cent of employers claim their workforce has been adequately trained, a disconnect that Randstad’s Amelia O’Carrigan warns could produce an “AI skills cliff”.

“Employers are moving quickly to adopt AI, but many workers haven’t been given the training to keep up,” O’Carrigan says. “Without proper training, AI doesn’t boost productivity, it erodes confidence.”

UNSW Professor Toby Walsh used a National Press Club address this week to warn that Australia is sleepwalking into an AI future without the investment, regulation, or independent expert advice that every comparable nation considers essential. He pointed to a global survey of 180 million job postings that found advertisements for graphic designers fell 33 per cent in 2025 compared to the prior year. Photographers dropped 28 per cent. Writers and copy editors fell by the same margin.

“I refuse to accept an AI revolution that enriches founders in Silicon Valley by impoverishing Australian artists, writers and musicians,” Walsh told the audience.

Dominic Price, the work futurist and former Atlassian executive, offered a more measured take. “AI is pouring accelerant on [workplace disruption], because in the short-term, business leaders see AI purely as productivity and cost out,” he says. “In the medium term AI should lead us to new business opportunities and the chance to redeploy people to grow new products and services.”

The other side of the equation

MacDonald, for her part, resists the narrative of robots stealing jobs. She used her redundancy payout to launch a consultancy helping other professionals – particularly mothers and caregivers – to navigate career disruption. She now has a portfolio career spanning brand consulting, hosting and media work.

“My story is very much not ‘grumpy, the robot stole my job’,” she says. “It’s more a pause and a pivot.”

And she refuses to be pessimistic about what’s coming. “I think we’re going to hit an inflection point,” she says. “Some organisations will realise they’ve cut too far, that there’s a ceiling on how far AI can get you. AI can take an average idea to good, but that’s about as far as it goes.”

The Electrical Trades Union’s Michael Wright offers a different kind of optimism, arguing that the physical infrastructure underpinning AI – data centres, energy systems, fibre networks – could create enormous demand for skilled Australian workers. Data centres are near population centres, he notes, providing varied work from cabling to off-grid generation, making them ideal training grounds for the next generation of electrical workers the nation desperately needs.

“This isn’t like the mining boom,” Wright says. “Data centres and energy transition are happening everywhere at the same time. If we want this done, we have to skill up and do it ourselves.”

What comes next?

The question corporate Australia now faces is not whether AI will reshape workforces – that debate is already settled. It’s how the transition will be managed, and who bears the cost.

CBA’s approach – pairing cuts with a $90 million retraining investment – may become the template. But not every company will have CBA’s resources or inclination. WiseTech’s cuts were announced to market cheers, as were Block’s. But for the thousands of workers caught in between – sitting on bedroom floors at 3am, refreshing their email, wondering what comes next – the macro narrative offers cold comfort.

An FSU survey found about three in four CBA employees are worried about their job security. Half have considered leaving.

“Two things can be true at once,” MacDonald puts it. “You can miss the lifestyle you had and not love what happened to you, while also loving the autonomy of the path you’re now on.”

A fast-growing chunk of corporate Australia could be about to find out for themselves what that path looks like.

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