A leading Australian fintech announced it will begin assessing employees on their use of AI as part of annual performance reviews as the company pushes toward becoming operationally “AI-native” by the end of June. Lendi Group staff will reportedly be evaluated on how effectively they use AI agents and integrate them into their daily work.
“[When] we go into our annual reviews at the end of July, people are expected and will be evaluated on their AI usage, the agents working for them, their performance of [working with] the agents, not just them,”
Lendi Head of Productivity and Automation Matthew Hargreaves told Atlassian’s Team ‘26 US conference earlier this month.
Hargreaves described how AI agents are already changing workflows across the business. Those changes are now being reinforced through performance management structures, embedding AI usage directly into employee expectations.
AI Agents Become Part of the Employee Workflow
Under the new framework, employees will reportedly be assessed on their AI usage, including how effectively they work alongside AI agents and how well those agents perform. Hargreaves described a future in which every employee effectively becomes a manager of digital workers, regardless of whether they oversee human teams.
According to Hargreaves, this shift is already influencing how staff communicate and collaborate internally.
He explained that the mindset shift has changed his own behavior, making him more deliberate during meetings by consciously recapping points and structuring discussions in ways that can be accurately captured in transcripts and later used by AI systems. The change illustrates how AI is beginning to reshape not just tasks, but workplace communication habits more broadly.
The company is also using AI-powered tools to accelerate prototyping and development work. Hargreaves highlighted how employees can now move ideas through “agentic workflows” that generate initial lines of code or create working prototypes using tools such as Magic Patterns, an AI-based design and rapid prototyping platform adopted by the company. The capability lowers the barrier to experimentation, allowing teams without deep technical expertise to test ideas more quickly.
Beyond product and engineering functions, Lendi Group has expanded AI automation into internal business operations. Employees submitting requests through Jira Service Management workflows can now trigger AI agents that process and action tasks automatically. One example involves parental leave applications, where agents reportedly calculate leave entitlements and return results significantly faster than traditional manual processes.
The same approach is also being applied to marketing governance and compliance reviews. Hargreaves said,
“Every piece of marketing content that goes to the public, whether it be an Instagram [post] or in a store, has to be reviewed by our legal team.”
But under the new AI-driven workflow, marketing content is submitted through internal systems and automatically assessed against branding and legal requirements before being escalated to legal teams only when necessary.
According to Hargreaves, the process helps the company respond faster to market developments, particularly in fast-moving sectors such as home loans and housing finance, where timely communication is critical.
Why Businesses Are Pushing Employees Toward AI Adoption
Lendi Group’s decision reflects a growing reality across the enterprise landscape: companies are under pressure to justify the enormous investments they have made in AI technologies.
Many organizations rushed to adopt generative AI tools amid intense market hype, but studies have shown that broad productivity gains have often been smaller and slower to materialize than expected.
At the same time, the growing promise of AI agents has fueled concerns that companies failing to adopt AI-native strategies quickly could fall behind competitors.
The fintech is attempting to drive this workplace transformation through its HR processes. The shift is placing new demands on HR departments, which are becoming central players in enterprise AI transformation strategies.
HR teams are now being tasked not only with workforce training and change management, but also with helping define what effective AI usage actually looks like across different roles. In some organizations, AI literacy is beginning to emerge as a performance metric alongside more traditional measures of productivity and collaboration.
Ironically, HR itself is also becoming a target for automation. Lendi Group’s use of AI agents to manage parental leave requests highlights how administrative functions can be streamlined through agentic workflows. By automating repetitive back-office tasks, HR teams can theoretically spend more time on strategic responsibilities such as talent development, culture, and workforce planning.
The development signals a broader evolution in the relationship between employees and technology. Rather than existing as a separate tool employees occasionally use, organizations increasingly want AI embedded into the structure of work itself. In that environment, the ability to manage, guide, and collaborate with AI agents may become as important as traditional digital skills once were.
AI-Native Workplaces May Soon Become the Norm
Lendi Group’s approach may still feel ambitious, but it offers a glimpse into how many companies are beginning to think about the future of work. AI is moving beyond simply augmenting work and becoming a core part of the workflow, influencing everything from communication and compliance to software development and HR administration.
The company’s decision to evaluate employees partly on AI usage also demonstrates how workplace expectations are evolving, with technology adoption becoming a core performance measure. As more organizations search for measurable returns on their AI investments, similar approaches are beginning to emerge elsewhere, including at KPMG, which has implemented an AI dashboard to track employee usage.
As businesses look for clearer returns on AI spending, monitoring how employees use AI day to day is increasingly becoming part of that conversation.
