Australia Is Adopting AI. Are We Developing the Leaders for It?

I keep hearing a familiar brief from Australian HR and L&D leaders at the moment.

The organisation has an AI strategy. Or it’s building one. Boards want progress. Executives want productivity. Staff are already experimenting with tools whether anyone formally approved them or not. And somewhere in the middle sits a quieter question: are our leaders ready to lead people through this?

I founded STRIDE after years in senior corporate roles, watching capable leaders hit ceilings that slides and workshops rarely shifted. Bringing people into the arena with horses showed me something different: real time feedback, less performance, more honesty. So when the recent Australian research landed, I read it through that lens. A lot of it aligns with what I see on the ground. Some of it raises questions worth sitting with.

Australian businesses are adopting AI. Transformation is still catching up.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics surveyed nearly 7,000 businesses for its 2024–25 Business Characteristics Survey. Around 12% reported using AI in the workplace, up from just 1% in 2021–22. Among large businesses, adoption jumped from 9% to 35%. Medium businesses moved from 3% to 22% (ABS, 2026).

That is real acceleration. Especially in information, media and telecommunications (38%), and in professional and financial services (both 24%).

Deloitte Australia’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise survey, part of a global study of more than 3,000 director to C-suite leaders, shows we are still early on genuine change. Only 12% of Australian respondents say generative AI is already transforming their business and industry, compared with 25% globally. Only 65% plan to increase AI investment in the next financial year, against a global average of 84% (Deloitte Australia, 2026).

Sixty-one percent of Australian respondents report AI is improving efficiency and productivity. That is useful. It is not yet the same as reimagining how work gets done. Just over half of Australian companies say talent and skills gaps are a significant barrier to scaling agentic AI. Only 22% report a highly advanced model for agent governance.

So adoption is happening. Broader transformation is uneven. That tracks with what I hear from leaders: tools are arriving faster than the capability to lead through them.

AHRI points to a leadership gap that is human, not just technical.

This is the part that matters most if you are designing leadership programs in Australia.

The Australian HR Institute’s March 2026 Quarterly Work Outlook finds skills investment is paying off for the broader workforce, but a leadership and management deficit, and a growing AI capability gap, threaten to stall progress (AHRI, 2026).

Look at where organisations say they need capability, and where they say managers are not proficient:

• Problem solving: 43% say it’s important; 36% feel managers are not proficient
• Strategic leadership: 39% say it’s important; 31% feel managers are not proficient
• Team development and people management: 39% say it’s important; 35% feel managers are not proficient

Those are the skills AI is supposed to free leaders up to use. They are also showing up as areas of real strain.

Training priorities tell a similar story. Technical and practical skills sit at the top (23%). Leadership and management, and AI and generative AI skills, tie next at 14% each. One in five respondents say critical thinking and problem solving will be critical to performance in an AI world, yet just 7% say developing critical thinking is a key focus, and only 9% cite broader interpersonal skills.

AHRI’s own conclusion is that there isn’t a strong balance yet between technical and human skills in most organisations.

I recognise that tension in the arena. People can often talk AI strategy comfortably. The harder work of presence, clarity and leading others through uncertainty takes longer to surface. That doesn’t mean every team has the same gap. It does mean the research and the lived moments are pointing in a similar direction.

Staff are moving. Leaders need to keep pace.

AHRI’s December 2025 Work Outlook, drawing on more than 600 senior HR professionals and business leaders, found that 68% of organisations now have formal AI policies or guidelines, and three-quarters are actively training employees to use AI for work (AHRI, December 2025).

That is progress. The open question is whether policy and tool training are enough when roles start shifting, when work is reallocated, or when people are unsure what their job looks like in two years. Trust and clarity are harder to build than tool fluency, and they sit with leaders.

CSIRO’s research into Australian firms offers a more grounded picture than the louder headlines. Analysing job ads from more than 4,000 Australian firms, researchers found firms adopting AI posted 36% more non AI job ads over time than comparable firms that had not adopted it. Demand for roles exposed to AI did not decline in those firms. Jobs were asking for more skills, not fewer. AI skills were appearing in roles you would not traditionally call “tech”, including sales, security and architecture (CSIRO, 2026).

Dr Claire Mason, who led the study, put it simply: AI isn’t sentient. It can’t reflect on its own thinking. Humans bring awareness, nuance and judgment.

That is the part of leadership development I think Australian organisations still underweight. Not because they don’t care about it, but because the human side is harder to schedule, measure and scale than a training module.

The national agenda is skills. Behaviour still has to be practised.

Australia’s National AI Plan, released in December 2025, puts spreading the benefits (including workforce skills, transparent workplace adoption, and meaningful consultation with workers) at the centre of the national response (Department of Industry, Science and Resources, 2025). The government is clear that workers and unions should have a voice in how AI is introduced.

Globally, similar patterns show up. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey found more than three-quarters of organisations use AI in at least one function, but only 21% of gen AI users had fundamentally redesigned workflows, and CEO oversight of AI governance was the factor most correlated with bottom line impact (McKinsey, 2025). Training Magazine’s 2026 Leadership Development Survey found gen AI use in leadership development more than doubled in a year (23% to 49%), while overall leadership development effectiveness barely moved over a decade, from 49% to 54% (Training Magazine, 2026).

What stands out in that global survey is that higher performing organisations used both: AI for scale and personalisation, plus executive engagement, coaching, action learning and applied experience.

That feels like the right direction for Australian HR too. Not technology or human development, but both. Content alone won’t close a behaviour gap.

Questions worth asking.

Every organisation will answer these differently. From the research and from the work I do with leaders, these are the ones I’d put on the table:

• Are we mainly training people to use AI tools, or also developing leaders who can guide others through the change? AHRI’s data points to proficiency gaps in problem solving, strategic leadership and people management, not only digital literacy.
• Is critical thinking getting real airtime? One in five say it will matter in an AI world. Very few are prioritising it.
• Where do leaders practise the harder human skills? Presence. Clarity. Trust under pressure. Honest feedback. Those land differently in lived experience than they do in a webinar.
• How are we measuring what sticks? Australia is investing in training. AHRI reports employers spent about $1,122 per employee on training in 2025 on average, and 60% expect expenditure to rise. The useful question is how much of that shows up as changed behaviour afterwards.

Why I still bring leaders to horses.

I didn’t start STRIDE as an anti technology idea. I started it because I’d lived the corporate side of leadership, and I had a herd that wouldn’t let me get away with performing leadership instead of practising it.

A horse doesn’t care about an AI roadmap. It responds to what is true in the moment: clarity, energy, hesitation, authority. There’s no rank in the arena. No slide deck. Nowhere to outsource presence to a tool.

Experiential learning isn’t the only path. It is one of the few places I’ve seen the skills AHRI highlights (people development, strategic presence, problem solving under ambiguity) show up quickly and honestly. When a 500kg animal won’t move until the signal is clear, leaders get feedback they can’t negotiate with. That kind of practice transfers.

AI can personalise a learning pathway. It can draft a coaching script. It can analyse a skills gap overnight. Those are powerful capabilities.

What it still can’t do well is sit with a leader when trust is thin, and give them a safe place to practise leading differently.

If you’re building an AI approach in an Australian organisation, the technical work matters. So does the human side. The data shows a gap between the two. Closing it will look different in every workplace, but leaving it unattended is a risk worth naming.