Are bots coming for tech jobs, or is it ‘AI-washing’? |
Are bots coming for tech jobs, or is it ‘AI-washing’?
March 15, 2026 — 5:00am
You have reached your maximum number of saved items.
Remove items from your saved list to add more.
Save this article for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.
The highlight from Australia’s road to AI job carnage last year was Matt Comyn’s Commonwealth Bank hitting a pothole and having to reverse call centre job cuts that were meant to have been irreversibly crushed by the rising tide of AI capabilities.
There will be no such reprieve for the 300 workers the bank laid off in an announcement last month, as it also unveiled a new plan for helping workers adjust to AI-driven workplace changes.
But as the Ides of March approached this year, it was some of Australia’s biggest tech success stories that were ready to give thousands of their employees a bitter taste of AI reality.
It started last month with logistics software titan WiseTech announcing that up to one-third of its workforce would be cut. New CEO, Zubin Appoo, declared that the era of manually writing code as a core job activity is over.
“We’re halving the human capacity, but we’re significantly increasing the overall capacity through agentic AI,” he said.
That same week, Afterpay owner Block unveiled a 40 per cent staff cull – around 4000 employees globally, including Australia.
“Something has changed,” Block founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said in a post with all lower-case text, obviously designed to convey that even an eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire understood the gravity of the situation.
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. And that’s accelerating rapidly,” he said.
The clear message is, AI is eating the sort of coders that brought it to fruition. FOBO – “fear of becoming........