This research was conducted in partnership with YouGov, who surveyed 1,071 white collar workers aged 18 years and older based in Australia. Fieldwork ran from September 9-14, 2025.

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Bottom Line Up Front

Summary: Australian teams are leaning into AI, yet the real gains come when it moves into a position where it can actually help. This report maps the friction points across quality, handoffs and trust and shows what Australian workers are demanding for in their future use.

Solution: Embed agentic, context‑aware AI directly into existing systems so it executes multi‑step workflows and delivers finished work, reducing rework and returning time to higher‑value tasks.

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Current AI tools reveal a clear outcomes gap

Australia has embraced AI in the workplace, yet white collar workers still spend excessive time fixing, pasting, and redoing work.

AI adoption and spending is rapidly increasing, with IDC forecasting that AI and GenAI investments in Asia Pacific will reach $175 billion by 2028. Despite this massive investment, companies aren't seeing the expected returns because current tools and workflows fail to deliver on productivity promises.

The vast majority of Australian white-collar workers (84%) are optimistic about AI's potential to transform work, and 4 in 5 (80%) say today's tools meet daily needs at least somewhat well.

Despite this strong optimism, a severe outcomes gap exists in Australia's workday with 69% reporting frustrations with workplace AI. Teams struggle with drafts rather than finished deliverables because of three key frictions: quality, handoffs, and trust:

• Lack of company context leads to generic AI outputs, which 34% of Australian workers cited as a top frustration.
• Information handoffs cause significant content rework, with 28% of workers expressing frustration about copying and pasting between tools and searching for missing details across fragmented systems. Additionally, leaders limit automation when systems lack explainability, audit trails, and review checkpoints.
• A quarter of workers (24%) share growing frustrations with AI saying tools cannot perform multi-step tasks, while 1 in 5 (20%) report tools are not integrated, and 18% indicate that tools lack company context.

While 43% say AI often frees time for creative or strategic work, 84% still significantly edit or fact-check outputs, diluting the gains.

Today's AI tools exist alongside workflows rather than being integrated into the actual work. Australian professionals waste time repeatedly establishing context, editing outputs, and switching between tools because they aren't receiving complete, finished results. This hampers potential productivity gains. The solution lies in agentic, integrated AI that works within existing systems, leverages company-specific context to improve output quality, and automates multi-step processes—shifting time allocation from administrative tasks to strategic thinking and meaningful outcomes.

The fragmentation of AI tools

Australian white-collar workers frequently use numerous AI tools, but these operate in isolation. Chatbots, productivity assistants, image generators, and coding pilots exist alongside each other, yet rarely, if at all, connect or integrate with each other. This disconnection results in fragmented workflows and a "tool-of-the-day" approach, ultimately forcing teams to resort to manual copy-paste operations and cumbersome handoffs.