New financial year, new budget. For a lot of Australian businesses and councils, that means the device refresh that has been sitting in the too-hard basket since Windows 10 support ended is finally funded. Shortlists are being drawn up right now: Copilot+ PCs, AI PCs, processor specifications that didn’t exist the last time anyone did this.
Before those orders go in, there’s a question worth asking, and it isn’t about hardware. When these devices land on desks, will anyone actually use the part you’re paying extra for?
The barrier isn’t the technology
ASI’s 2025 Growth and Resiliency report found many Australian organisations are aligning AI PC adoption with their existing device refresh cycles, while others are accelerating because Windows 10 support has ended. Either way, budget is moving.
The report is blunt about why that often doesn’t pay off. The barriers it lists include uncertain ROI, integration complexity, and a lack of skills to fully exploit AI features. The first two are engineering problems. The third is about people, and it’s the one least likely to appear anywhere in the procurement process.
The report’s own conclusion puts it plainly:
The promise of AI-PCs lies not in hardware alone, but in aligning device capabilities to role-specific outcomes: reducing tickets per user, improving time-to-task, and strengthening security through embedded AI features.
That is the whole argument. A refresh pays off when device capability meets people capability. Fund the first without the second and you have bought a faster version of the same problem.
The cost of the gap, in numbers
The friction is easy to dismiss because it never appears as a line item. It appears as time. ASI’s research into IT support ticket volumes found:
- 47% of IT support tickets are for basic issues: password resets, file management, application navigation.
- Employees lose around three hours a week to tech struggles that better digital skills would prevent.
- 73% of remote employees hit four or more tech disruptions a week.
- 40% try to fix problems themselves first, often making them worse and more expensive to resolve by the time IT sees them.
Electric.ai research puts the recoverable time at 140 hours per employee per year. Against Australian Bureau of Statistics average wage data, that comes to roughly AU$5,600 per employee annually. For a 300-person council or business, that’s AU$1.68 million in productivity sitting on the table, from a workforce that already has the technology in front of them.
It is the number your refresh business case implicitly promised to reduce.
You can’t hire your way out of this
The instinct when IT is stretched is to look at headcount, and the market makes that difficult. ASI’s research found more than half of Australian organisations struggle to hire IT staff, while fewer than 20% have retention problems. The squeeze is particularly acute in cyber security, software development and AI-related roles. In government it’s sharper again, with 74% of agencies reporting recruitment difficulty.
So the constraint isn’t going to ease. Which leaves building capability in the people you already have, and that turns out to be the better answer regardless. When staff can handle the small things themselves, IT gets its week back for the work that reduces future demand. The devices get used properly. The business case holds up.
It also spreads the load. Digital confidence in most organisations is concentrated in a handful of people who have become the informal support layer for everyone around them, usually without anyone deciding that should be their job. Broadening it means fewer staff waiting on whoever happens to be free.
Where capability actually comes from
Not from a session in rollout week. Staff handed new hardware and an hour of instruction on features they have no context for will return to a full inbox and revert to what they know, which is what the old device did.
What holds is role-relevant learning delivered in short, regular blocks, with coaching that reinforces it as the tools change. A planning officer and a payroll administrator need different things from the same laptop, and both need more than one exposure to build real confidence.
Microsoft updates Microsoft 365 and Copilot constantly. Around 15 minutes a week is enough for staff to keep pace. That is the cadence ASI has built with over 40,000 users through structured digital skills programmes.
Refresh with intention
The device decision matters. Specification, security posture, manageability, funding model, all of it deserves the attention it gets. But the return on that decision is determined by something that usually isn’t in the same conversation, and often isn’t in the same budget line.
Pair the two now, while the money is still being allocated, and the refresh delivers what the business case said it would. Leave it eighteen months and you’ll be making the same case with less goodwill and nothing left in the budget to fund it.
Planning your refresh this year? Book a 1-hour Digital Skills Workshop. We’ll help you work out where digital capability will make the biggest difference to your people, and what closing that gap is worth, whatever ends up on the purchase order.
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