The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is rolling out Microsoft Copilot to administrative staff for everyday tasks, not to boost immediate efficiency but to build broad AI familiarity across the organisation that could later inform improvements to core services. CIO Mark Sawade, speaking at Gartner's IT Symposium, described this as building "return on employee" rather than expecting a direct return on investment, while keeping generative and agentic AI away from sensitive processes like fraud detection for now.

Sawade cited an internal hackathon in which a COBOL developer with no prior C# or .Net experience won using GitHub Copilot, which he said demonstrated how generative AI lets staff work confidently outside their usual technical domain. He also outlined longer-term ambitions, including AI-assisted personal agents that could remind taxpayers to file returns, though he acknowledged identity verification remains a major obstacle. Drawing a comparison with the shift from six-hour paper tax returns in the 1990s to 12-minute digital filing today, he said the ATO wants similarly large gains from AI, while cautioning that clear goals and lessons from other organisations' costly missteps, such as unchecked token spending, must guide the approach.