TECH TEAMS TUESDAY · A Building Tech Teams publication
How Australia hires, builds, and leads tech teams in the age of AI.
01 · THE PATTERN
For the past year AI has been sold as a way to need fewer people. This week we’ve seen pushback, more questions about whether AI alone is the answer, or how important are humans to the success of AI implementation.
IBM, which let AI eat its HR function, is tripling entry-level hiring. Ford is rehiring engineers for quality problems the automated systems could not crack. And 55 percent of executives who cut staff for AI now say it was a mistake. Told to a survey, on the record.
Meanwhile the biggest AI vendor on earth just committed $2.5 billion and 6,000 humans to making AI actually work inside companies. That’s right, Microsoft’s answer to the AI adoption problem is people.
Australia never saw the same AI cuts that were experienced globally, the AI Jobs Index actually tracks that. But we definitely experienced companies not replacing roles, seeing whether a smaller team with better tooling could do the same work. The news this week is revealing that taking a slower approach to an AI rollout, training and up-skilling staff around AI, rather than replacing them with AI not only saves jobs but provides better financial outcomes.
My read: the market is discovering that AI capability is also a people capability. The teams that treated their people as the asset AI multiplies, instead of the cost AI removes, are about to look very smart.
02 · THE MOVES
1. The AI layoff regret era has officially started
39 percent of executives say they laid people off because of AI. 55 percent of those now say it was the wrong call. IBM is the headline case: its AI handled 94 percent of routine HR requests, could not handle the rest, and the company is now tripling entry-level hiring across US business units in 2026. Its own HR chief put it plainly: cut the entry level and in three to five years there is no pipeline. The well dries up.
For leaders: Australia is earlier in this cycle, and that is the advantage. The Index has logged 3,610 Australian jobs cut in events where the company itself named AI, and the local rehiring wave has not started yet. We usually run a year or so behind the US on these cycles, which means you get to watch their regret curve and skip it. Before your next reduction plan, name what each person knows that is not written down anywhere. That is what walks out the door.
For tech professionals: if you were cut in an Australian AI restructure, this is your evidence that it was the balance sheet talking, not your value. The US rehiring has started and our market follows. And if you are early-career: the Australian companies still hiring juniors are the ones thinking about the future of their talent pools. Those are the jobs to look out for.
2. Microsoft put 6,000 humans and $2.5 billion on AI implementation
Microsoft launched Frontier Company, a unit of 6,000 engineers, consultants and support staff embedded directly with customers to make AI work inside real businesses. It’s the same move OpenAI and Anthropic made earlier this year.
For leaders: the vendor selling you the models just priced the gap between buying AI and benefiting from it at $2.5 billion. Here is why that gap is wider in Australia: the Index counts 86 live AI-specialist roles nationally. You cannot hire this capability locally at any volume, which is exactly the market the consultant wave is built for. Decide now whether you rent implementation from the vendor or build it into your own teams, because renting forever means your capability lives on someone else’s payroll, and you’re forever “on the hook”.
For tech professionals: forward deployed engineer is about to be one of the most hireable titles in Australian tech, because the local supply barely exists. The skills are learnable from where you sit: ship AI into one messy real process, measure the result, repeat. This week’s podcast guest sees the same shift from inside Australian enterprise, where the security budget is losing the same fight (more below).
3. At Lendi, how well you work with AI is now part of your rating
Lendi Group will score staff on how they train and use AI agents in the annual reviews landing at the end of this month. Their head of productivity put it plainly: people will be evaluated on their AI usage and on the performance of the agents working for them.
For leaders: if you want to change behaviour, and drive the increased adoption of AI within your organisation it makes sense to measure it. As the old line goes: “Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave.” It makes perfect sense for Lendi who are driving toward becoming AI native. For leaders looking at something similar, I’d suggest measuring the results of the AI usage, where did AI, workflows or agents actually move the needle.
For tech professionals: AI fluency just moved from encouraged to rated, and Lendi will not be the last. The good news is this rewards people who do the work. It is learnable, and the window to learn it is still open.
03 · FROM THE INDEX
One read a week from the AI Jobs Index, the live tracker I run at aijobsindex.com.au.
LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise list, published in January, named AI engineer the fastest-growing job in Australia, with Director of AI at number four and AI literacy the most in-demand skill in the market.
Here is what the headlines do not tell you. Right now the Index counts 86 live Australian AI-specialist roles. Against that, a third of the technology job ads we scan, 994 of 2,985 in the past 30 days, mention AI somewhere in the copy.
Both things are true at once. The specialist lane of genuine AI specific roles is growing fast off a tiny base. The expectation of most roles having AI knowledge or skills is spreading everywhere. Fastest-growing and still scarce is exactly what a skill looks like when the majority are still trying to figure it out.
For leaders: your next AI hire is probably a rewrite of a role you already have, not a unicorn specialist you will be outbid on. Write the job ad that admits it.
For tech professionals: the AI premium is moving into ordinary titles. Eight in ten leaders say they would take the person comfortable with AI over the person with more years. The skills or projects line on your CV naming AI tools or AI Projects you’ve worked on can be more important than the total years of experience.
04 · TEAM MOVE OF THE WEEK
Sarah Carney, first Head of AI and Automation, AustralianSuper.
Announced in May, in the job this month: AustralianSuper pulled Microsoft’s national CTO for Australia and New Zealand to run AI for the country’s biggest super fund, over $410 billion managed for 3.6 million members. (iTnews)
Two signals in one move. The AI seat at big Australian institutions is now senior enough to pull top vendor talent out of a decade-long career. And the funds that manage your retirement money have decided AI ownership needs a name at the top, not a working group. When the most conservative capital in the country moves first, the rest of the market has less time than it thinks.
05 · WHAT I’M BUILDING
This is the machine I built (well Claude built) that is allowing me to put together a weekly newsletter.
Friday 9am, a scheduled job scans my Building Tech Teams intel inbox (which houses emails from about thirty different newsletters I’ve subscribed to, which I’ve had the best intentions to read but infrequently get around to), and runs a live web search, then hands me the top six ranked stories and five people moves. Every one carries the source link and the article date. I pick three and one for the newsletter. The same run writes a row into a steer ledger: what worked last week, what to change this week. That ledger is the training data for the next version of the system.
Once I’ve completed my selections, a second job takes my picks and structures the issue in substack: my locked section structure, the headlines, the live AI Jobs Index figure pulled at draft time, leaving free the sections I need to write.
Sometime between Friday selecting the articles and Monday midnight I write the email sections because it’s the part I enjoy, the part I hope provides most value. The newsletter provides me an opportunity to have commentary on what’s happening in the industry, without having to do hours and hours of research or tedious formatting.
I’ve set up skills in Claude for banner creation for the top of the newsletter, and putting the little play button on my podcast images, making these near automatic to just drop in.
Failures so far include: the feed served me a competitor’s research, two stories I covered last week, and items three weeks old. So the rules got harder. Article dates verified, links mandatory, competitor sources banned, no repeat companies from the previous issue.
AI gathers. I decide. Every pick, every position, every spelling mistake in this issue is mine. The system just makes sure I spend my hours on the writing instead of the collating.
06 · THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST
Episode 2 is out this morning: Kevin Akermanis on why AI is eating the security budget.
Kevin is a solutions architect at Okta working across their enterprise customers in Asia Pacific, after 15 years at Salesforce.
What we get into:
• Okta’s customer security council found security funding flatlining or falling while money pours into anything labelled AI. Kevin explains why that is backwards.
• Agents are non-human identities. Non-deterministic, able to roam, and guardrails are just suggestions. Scope them small and time-box them.
• Australia does not want agents, it wants MCP. Your customers start in Claude, not on your website.
• The coming skill deficit: entry-level work pushed onto AI, and nobody left to backfill the seniors.
That last one is this week’s newsletter Pattern, told from inside the enterprise.
Why it matters: Australian companies are pushing AI into production while security budgets go backwards. If your team is part human, part agent, this is how you scope it before the breach instead of explaining it after.
Listen: buildingtechteams.com.au/podcast/kevin-akermanis-ai-is-eating-the-security-budget · Apple · Spotify · YouTube
07 · THE ASK
This is issue two of the newsletter and I’m keen to provide as much value as possible, I’d love a reply. Let me know your favourite section or what you’d like to see in the future. I read every reply myself, and it’ll help feed what comes back to you in this newsletter.
Cheers,
James
Tech Teams Tuesday is the weekly read from Building Tech Teams. Written by James MacDonald, MD of NTP Talent. The AI Jobs Index is a Building Tech Teams publication. Powered by NTP Talent.