Do you work at an organisation in 2026? If so, here are four insights from Sarah Carney, Microsoft's CTO for Australia and New Zealand, that you can use to help build productive hybrid team processes.
As a featured expert in our Leading tech-enabled teams sprint, Sarah Carney has offered clear and practical insights and advice on navigating the digitally transformed world of work.
Here are some highlights:
1. The upsides of ugliness
Organisations have spent three years swinging AI at everything that moves. Sarah’s diagnosis is unsentimental: 95% of AI programs see no return on investment. The reason isn’t the technology. It's that nobody stopped to ask what problem they were solving. At Microsoft, the breakthrough use case wasn’t a boardroom moonshot—it was laptop onboarding. Seven systems, purchase orders, entitlement checks, delivery logistics… these have been distilled into a single prompt. The ugliest process turned out to be the most valuable target.
2. “Comfort inertia”: the silent killer
If you give people a new tool and an option to keep doing things the old way, they’ll choose the old way every time. Sarah calls this “comfort inertia”. It helps explain why Copilot licences distributed without work redesign result in expensive indifference. The fix isn’t another training video that people will ‘watch’ on 2x speed. The solution is structural: change the process so backsliding takes more effort than adoption. And make sure it come from the top.
3. Real communities, not centres for excellence
Before Microsoft rolled out Copilot internally, they spent four weeks running challenges on ChatGPT. Superhero selfies. Poems. AI-generated action figures. Through this silly, low-stakes, and quietly effective program, people built confidence without realising they were being upskilled. Then came a fortnightly drop-in call for questions. The call died two years ago. The chat it spawned still runs: 700 people, sharing prompts, hacks, and spectacular failures daily. Who needs a centre of excellence when you have a playful community?
4. The tech is only 20% of the puzzle
Change management is the first line item that gets cut from technology projects—and it’s the single biggest reason they fail. Sarah’s ratio (20% technology, 80% people) is a useful corrective for anyone who thinks procurement is the hard part. Her own agent disaster—a decade of emails answered overnight, including to a state government CISO—became a teaching moment precisely because she shared it with her team. Leaders who experiment publicly and fail visibly create the permission everyone else needs. The ones who delegate innovation downward and wait for a report back get the culture they deserve.
Learn how to create a hybrid workplace that works for everyone with the Leading tech-enabled teams sprint, developed in partnership with Microsoft.
The sprint is led by Dr Daniel Schlagwein, Professor of Digital Work and Organisation, and Dr Maegan Baker, Strategy and Innovation Expert.
