A new Mercer study has found that six in ten Australian companies believe up to one in five of their jobs will be lost to AI adoption within two years. That is not a fringe prediction from a tech commentator. That is the view of the majority of Australian businesses, surveyed right now, about their own workforce. And the word Mercer’s researchers reached for was not “unprepared.” It was sleepwalking. That distinction matters more than people are giving it credit for.
What the Mercer Study Actually Says
The Mercer findings, reported by News.com.au, point to a workforce reality that most business owners are sensing but have not yet acted on. The majority of Australian companies surveyed believe significant job displacement is coming, and they believe it is coming fast. Within two years is not a long runway. It is roughly the time it takes to hire and onboard a new team member, let alone redesign how an entire department operates.
Sleepwalking is a precise word. It does not mean ignorant. Sleepwalkers are moving. They are doing things. They are just not conscious of where they are headed or what is in their path. That is the situation many Australian businesses are in right now. AI tools are being adopted. Workflows are quietly shifting. But the people inside those businesses, the ones whose roles are changing, are largely not part of the conversation.
That is the gap. And it is widening.
The Businesses That End Up on the Wrong Side of This Will Not Be the Ones That Ignored AI
This is the part that does not get said enough. The failure mode most people imagine is the business owner who buried their head in the sand and refused to engage with AI at all. That business exists, but it is not the most common risk.
The more common risk is the business that moved on the technology without ever having an honest conversation with their team about what was coming. They bought the tools. They ran the pilot. They optimised the workflow. And somewhere in that process, the people whose roles were changing found out through a team meeting, a restructure announcement, or a change to their job description rather than a genuine conversation that happened months earlier.
That is where trust breaks down. And once trust breaks down in a team going through a technology transition, the cost of recovering it is far higher than the efficiency gain the technology was meant to deliver.
Industry data consistently shows that the majority of AI adoption failures trace back to human and process challenges rather than technical ones. The tools work. The integrations hold. What fails is the human layer, the buy in, the understanding, the psychological safety to engage with something new rather than resist it.
What Sleepwalking Actually Looks Like Inside a Business
It rarely looks dramatic. It looks like a business owner who knows they need to do something about AI but keeps pushing it to next quarter. It looks like a manager who has started using AI tools quietly, without telling their team, because they are not sure how to frame it. It looks like a workforce that has heard the word AI in every industry publication for two years but has never once been asked by their employer what they think about it or what they are worried about.
The default human response to AI is fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of being replaced by something they do not understand. Fear of asking a question that makes them look like they are behind. That fear does not disappear because a business adopts a new tool. It goes underground. And underground fear is far more damaging to a team than the surface level anxiety that an honest conversation could have addressed.
Business owners who understand this are not the ones with the most sophisticated AI stack. They are the ones who sat down with their teams before anything was implemented and said, here is what we are looking at, here is why, here is what it means for your role, and here is what we are going to do together to prepare for it.
The Technology Is Ready. The Real Question Is Whether Your People Are.
The tools available to Australian businesses right now are genuinely capable. The pricing is accessible. The functionality is improving faster than most teams can absorb. None of that is the bottleneck anymore.
The bottleneck is the human side. It always has been. It was true in the shift to cloud computing. It was true in the move to digital operations. It is true now with AI, but the stakes are higher because the pace of change is faster and the scope of roles affected is broader than any technology transition that came before it.
What a responsible business does right now is not wait for the technology to stabilise or for the regulatory environment to settle or for a competitor to move first. What a responsible business does is start the conversation with its people. Not a policy document. Not a training module pushed through an LMS. A real conversation about what is changing, what the business is considering, and what the team needs to be able to adapt well.
That conversation does not require a finished AI strategy. It requires honesty and enough lead time to actually prepare people rather than surprise them.
What the Businesses That Get This Right Are Doing Differently
They are not necessarily the fastest movers. They are not always the most technically sophisticated. What they have in common is that they treat AI adoption as a people project that happens to involve technology, rather than a technology project that will eventually affect people.
They map their workflows before they touch their tools. They identify which roles are going to change and they talk to the people in those roles before the change happens. They invest in upskilling not as a compliance exercise but as a genuine signal to their team that the business sees a future for them in it. They measure adoption not just by output metrics but by whether their team actually feels equipped and supported.
The businesses that will look back in five years and say they got this right will not be the ones that adopted AI first. They will be the ones that brought their people with them. That is not a soft outcome. It is the most durable competitive advantage available right now, because it is the one thing that cannot be copied by a competitor who just buys the same software.
The Mercer study is a useful data point. But the number that matters more than the headline figure is the one inside your own business. How many of your people know what is coming, and how many of them have been given a genuine path forward? If you do not know the answer to that, that is where to start.
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