As AI speeds up the world for senior leaders, what does this mean for workers expected to keep up?
A new workplace reality is emerging.
Junior workers can walk into a meeting to find their boss has already used AI to triage their emails, summarise the news, draft talking points, prepare slides and review proposals before the meeting has even begun.
Meanwhile, they have barely used AI for anything beyond brushing up their résumé.
New research from The AI Breakpoint, a national study of 1,006 Australian workers aged 18 to 64, suggests this divide is already taking shape across Australian workplaces.
While AI was supposed to give younger workers a new advantage, in many workplaces the opposite appears to be happening. Senior managers and executives are not only embracing AI at dramatically higher rates than the entry-level and junior employees they manage and lead, they are also far more likely to report benefits from using it.
One of the clearest patterns to emerge is how AI becomes progressively more embedded as workers move up the organisational ladder. Weekly AI use doubles between junior employees and senior leaders (73% vs 37%), while reported productivity gains from AI almost triple (77% vs 28%).
Helping to explain this difference in productivity is how senior leaders are almost twice as likely as junior workers to say AI saves them time (83% vs 46%), and are more than twice as likely to say it improves the quality of their work (68% vs 32%).
"AI is making my work feel a lot more fast paced," a male senior manager/executive aged 35 to 44 working in government and public administration in metropolitan Queensland said.
Another senior manager/executive aged 35 to 44 working in retail and consumer services in regional Queensland described how AI is changing the way he works.
“AI’s biggest impact on my work is saving time by handling admin tasks faster, like emails, reports, and research, while also increasing pressure for people to adapt and work more efficiently,” he said.
Meanwhile, an entry-level/junior employee aged 18 to 24 working in healthcare and social assistance in regional New South Wales described her experience.
“I don’t feel that AI is having any real impact on my work or career,” she said.
Such a wide gap in how workers at opposite ends of the organisational ladder experience AI raises the possibility of a widening expectations gap between them. Since leaders help define standards, as AI increases their own capabilities, their expectations of others may begin to change alongside this.
This matters because senior leaders are not just using AI more often than other workers. They are also more likely to use AI across all types of work tasks, from research and learning through to coding and technical work, creating more areas of work where expectations around AI use could potentially change.
The question is whether junior workers can be expected to keep up with this new pace, or whether workplaces need to balance the need for speed with giving them the time and opportunities to learn and develop in the same way today’s leaders once did.
Breakpoint founder Ian Walker said how workplaces navigate this tension could have important implications for careers.
“We’re seeing the emergence of the first generation of AI-enabled leaders,” he said.
“It’s becoming a central part of how they operate. But if managers are routinely using AI to improve the speed and quality of their work, their experiences could start to shape their expectations for everyone else too."
Together, these findings reveal how AI is being experienced across different role levels. For senior leaders it increasingly functions as a force multiplier augmenting and automating the skills and judgement they already possess, while for junior workers it is mostly used in bits and pieces as they try and build the skills and judgement they need to possess for their future.
This helps explain why junior workers are far less likely to see AI as a positive for the profession compared to their bosses. For senior leaders it is largely clear to themselves what benefits AI is offering them, but for many juniors it is not.
As a result, one in three junior workers are still uncertain of what AI means for their their chosen career path – more than those who either see it positively, negatively or as a mix of both.
So as senior leaders use AI more the question becomes what happens inside workplaces when they do. With AI weaving its way into how they solve problems and save time, this may gradually become the benchmark for others too.
As their world speeds up the challenge for senior leaders today is to ensure junior workers are supported to keep pace without sacrificing developing the fundamentals they need to become the senior leaders of tomorrow guiding the next generation.
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The AI Breakpoint explores how Australian workers are adopting AI, how experiences differ across organisational levels, and where gaps in AI use, productivity and workplace support are emerging.
