Quick question before we begin.
Did I, Marie-Antoinette Issa, a journalist with 20+ years of experience write this article … Or did ChatGPT?
These days, that’s becoming a surprisingly difficult question to answer. But, a timely one as we mark AI Appreciation Day – the one day of the year where we’re encouraged to say a quiet “thanks” to the technology that’s become our brainstorming partner, research assistant, proofreader, meeting summariser and, occasionally, the only colleague available to help you craft a perfect text reply to a sleazy ex at 11:47pm.
Whether you love it, fear it or still refuse to admit you’ve asked it to rewrite an awkward email, artificial intelligence has well and truly earned its place in our daily lives.
But while we’ve spent the last few years learning how to type better prompts, the next chapter of AI could sound very different. Literally.
According to Ling Lu, Head of New Product Development at Jabra, we’re on the cusp of a major behavioural shift.
“AI has already transformed the way we work and the next shift will be how we interact with it.”
In other words, forget typing.
Instead of firing questions into a chat box, we’ll increasingly speak to AI as naturally as we speak to our colleagues. Need a meeting summarised? Ask. Want feedback on a presentation? Just say it. Looking for ideas when your brain has officially clocked off for the day? AI will quite literally be listening.
Jabra’s research suggests voice interaction with AI could become mainstream by 2028, making conversations – not keyboards – the primary way many of us work with generative AI.
It’s a future that feels oddly familiar. After all, we’ve spent years training ourselves to say “Hey Siri,” “Alexa,” or “OK Google.” Talking to technology no longer feels strange. Talking to an AI colleague? That’s rapidly becoming the next logical step.
But there’s one catch. AI is only as clever as what it can hear.
As Ling points out, 99% of knowledge workers say poor audio negatively impacts online meetings. If you’ve ever sat through a video call where someone’s dog, dishwasher and keyboard were competing for airtime, you’ll understand the problem.
When AI starts joining those conversations, poor audio isn’t just frustrating – it becomes a productivity issue. Background noise, muffled voices and patchy microphones don’t just confuse your colleagues; they confuse your AI assistant too.
Which, ironically enough, echoes the same question I opened with… just wearing a different outfit. It’s not only “can AI hear us clearly?” It’s “are we ready to work alongside it at all?”
That’s the bigger conversation happening in workplaces right now. While businesses across Australia and New Zealand are moving AI from experimentation into everyday operations, the organisations that succeed won’t necessarily be the ones adopting the latest tools first. They’ll be the ones that understand how to make those tools genuinely useful for their people.
According to Jessica Zhang, Senior Vice President, ADP APAC, ADP research shows that 44% of Australian workers are already using AI at least multiple times a week. Yet, only 13% expect it to positively impact their job responsibilities in the year ahead.
That gap is the real story. Employees are already elbow-deep in AI tools. But, most of them still can’t tell you whether it’s making their actual job better. Or just… different.
Zhang says this is where organisations need to take a more deliberate approach. And, understand which tasks are best suited to AI, while protecting the human skills that remain essential: judgement, creativity, context and collaboration. ADP calls this “The Great Job Unbundling” – pulling jobs apart into their component tasks and deciding, piece by piece, what a person should keep doing and what a machine can take off their plate.
Because ultimately, the future of AI isn’t just about smarter machines. It’s about creating smarter partnerships between humans and technology – the same kind of partnership, incidentally, that produced this article.
But partnerships only work if you trust the other party. And that’s the part of the AI conversation that gets far less airtime than voice assistants or job unbundling: what’s actually happening under the hood.
According to Itzik Swissa, Country Manager A/NZ & Senior Director at JFrog, Australia is doing better on this front than most of the world realises. The JFrog 2026 Software Supply Chain Security State of the Union found 68% of Australian organisations now self-host their AI models, 47% automate blocking of unapproved developer tools at the workstation layer, and 67% have full production provenance visibility. All leading figures globally.
“AI Appreciation Day is a good moment to take stock of how far we’ve come. And, what it takes to keep moving forward responsibly,” Swissa says.
But the picture isn’t spotless. 62% of Australian organisations aren’t actively scanning for exposed credentials, API keys, or tokens. This makes secrets detection, in Swissa’s words, “the most under-deployed security control relative to threat level” in markets like Australia.
It’s part of the reason JFrog joined both Chainguard’s Project Athena and IBM/Red Hat’s Lightwell coalitions – industry efforts to make sure vulnerabilities in open source get found, fixed and remediated at enterprise scale, not just patched in isolation.
“Appreciating what AI enables means investing in the conditions that make it trustworthy,” Swissa says. “That is what JFrog stands for, and we’re proud to say that work is already well underway in Australia.”
So, as we celebrate AI Appreciation Day, perhaps it’s time to appreciate the technology that helps AI do its job, too. And, the unglamorous, unseen work of keeping it trustworthy in the first place.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another article to write.
Or perhaps my AI co-author does…
