Published on the 22/10/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Time for T-shaped leaders to harness innovation…

Australia’s technology professionals are hitting a career ceiling – and it’s costing the country innovation and leaving organisations at risk of defaulting to ‘adoption over invention’ in technology.

A new dialogue paper from the Actuaries Institute says while AI is increasingly central to business strategy, the technology professionals driving those areas are rarely seen in senior management.

“Companies that fail to elevate technical leaders risk becoming passive adopters of technology, rather than active innovators.”

It says companies risk falling behind their global competitors in harnessing the benefits of AI unless they ‘urgently’ bring more tech professionals into senior management roles.

The report, authored by Actuaries Institute fellow and executive AI transformation executive for Quantium, Victor Bajanov, says organisations lack senior career pathways for technical talent.

“After seven to 10 years, our best data scientists face an impossible choice: Abandon their technical expertise for management or remain in limited individual contributor roles. Meanwhile, global tech giants offer nine-figure packages to secure top technical talent.”

(That’s reference to Meta’s hiring for its ‘superintelligence lab’ where top tier research talent has been offered packages of up to $300m over four years, with $100m in compensation for the first year.)

The report, Where are Australia’s Data Science Leaders, says too many companies are focused on implementing existing AI and data science solutions rather than driving genuine technical innovation. While such implementations can deliver value, they leave companies exposed to the whims of global big tech, and miss the opportunity to invent tomorrow’s AI capabilities.

The report notes a lack of technical qualifications among chief data officers, saying the majority hold business leadership, rather than technical, qualifications. It says recent analysis shows just 35 percent of chief data officers in Australia hold a Bachelor’s degree as their highest qualification, with the remainder pursuing advanced business-focused degrees. A lack of scale up experience is also noted.

The report highlights the strategic risk involved in the lack of technology representation in senior levels: Without technical voices in the in the boardroom, companies may struggle to make informed decisions about emerging technologies, data governance and risk modelling.

“Companies that fail to elevate technical leaders risk becoming passive adopters of technology, rather than active innovators,” the report says.

Bajanov says its critical for companies to have people in the C-suite with backgrounds and know-how in coding, building machine learning models and managing hybrid teams that include people and AI agents – and the battle scars from doing that.

“Deep understanding come from active practice,” he says. “This will help companies across multiple sectors face the increasing challenge of developing proprietary solutions rather than relying solely on buying standardised AI tools.”

The report highlights the need for leaders who understand the realities of building and deploying AI systems – not just those who can talk about them. Those leaders bring a nuanced understanding of what it takes to scale AI responsibly, manage data risk and align technical execution with business goals.

The paper argues that a technically led organisation could achieve with 10 people what traditionally requires 100, while improving both quality and speed.

Enter the T-shaped leader

The report highlights successful Australian technical founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar of Atlassian, to demonstrate that tech leaders can effectively run major enterprises, and notes the new generation of promising technical leadership in the form of Lorikeet and Relevance AI, but says while emerging companies offer hope the broader pattern ‘remains concerning’.

It’s calling for technical expertise to get a seat at the top, with dual career tracks to enable technical professionals to reach senior leadership positions.

The paper says to capture the opportunities of the AI revolution, Australian organisations need leaders who combine deep technical fluency, hybrid team orchestration and innovation at the frontier.

The leaders need hands-on experience with AI systems, the ability to manage hybrid-human-AI teams and the confidence to operate without established playbooks.

“The days of ‘no one gets fired for buying IBM’ are over’. Technical work is becoming increasingly dynamic, requiring professionals to form independent judgements based on limited information, rather than following prescribed best practices from textbooks or certification courses,” the report notes.

With that shift, comes the need for leaders who can navigate uncertainty and evaluate novel technical approaches in real time.

“Pure business managers must acquire technical literacy to understand what AI can and cannot do, while technically skilled professionals need to learn the leadership side to guide hybrid teams [of humans and AI systems] effectively.”

Technical leadership is no longer a nice-to-have for specialised R&D functions, instead it’s an ‘existential requirement’ for any organisation hoping to remain relevant, the Actuaries Institute says.

“The question is not whether to develop deep technical leadership, but how quickly we can build this capability before the competitive gap becomes insurmountable.”