I started my career in the thick of the hustle era – when success meant being the first in, the last out, and saying yes to everything. The girl-boss movement told women like me that we could have it all, as long as we worked twice as hard to prove it. And for a long time, I did. But as my business grew, I learned that chasing productivity for productivity’s sake isn’t leadership – it’s exhaustion dressed up as ambition.
So when AI arrived promising to make work lighter, in some ways I breathed a sigh of relief. We were told it would take care of the repetitive tasks, free us from the noise, and finally give us back the one thing every woman in leadership is starved for – time. But for many, the opposite has been true. Studies show 77 per cent of employees say AI has actually increased their workload, and the UN estimates AI is nearly three times more likely to replace a woman’s job than a man’s.
The promise of progress has somehow landed us back where we started – stretched thin, overworked, and told to be grateful for the efficiency.
So if technology is shaping the future of work, we have to ask: who is it really serving?
Because when you look around the rooms where that future is being designed, women still aren’t leading the conversation. We make up the majority of the creative workforce, yet hold only 11 per cent of creative-director roles globally. The pipeline isn’t the problem – the system is. The structures that reward constant output and endless availability are still the ones being celebrated as ambition, while the qualities women bring to leadership – care, collaboration and boundary-setting – are treated as nice-to-haves (and sometimes weaknesses) instead of essential leadership traits.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can use technology differently – not to push harder, but to create space and drive growth.
Everywhere I looked, businesses were celebrating the time they’d saved through AI, but what they did with that time felt deeply telling. Some were using it as a reason to make redundancies; others to pile more work onto smaller teams. Neither felt like progress to me.
If technology was genuinely meant to make work easier, why did it so often end up costing people their stability, creativity or sense of purpose?
At Melbourne Social Co, we’d been quietly experimenting with AI for months – automating the small things, testing tools, finding ways to make our creative process more efficient. And while it was helping, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were standing at a fork in the road. We could use AI to do more, or we could use it to do better.
That’s how our AI Dividend Fund was born.
We asked ourselves: what if, instead of letting efficiency become another measure of productivity, we turned it into an opportunity to reinvest in our people? What if the hours saved through AI could become hours given back – to learn, to upskill, to create?
After running the numbers, we found that even with minimal AI integration, our team was saving around four hours a month each. So through the AI Dividend Fund, we take those four hours – along with an additional quarterly paid allowance – and reinvest them into every team member. They can use the time and budget for growth in areas they’ve identified as most meaningful: leadership, communication, creativity, and technology.
It’s a scheme funded by the time saved through AI – a literal dividend of innovation, returned to the people behind it.
Too often, the conversation around AI has been one of replacement – of output, efficiency and cost-cutting. It’s the same old productivity story, just told through shinier technology. But for me, that version of progress feels hollow. When innovation comes at the expense of people – particularly women – it isn’t innovation at all. It’s extraction.
Our approach at Melbourne Social Co has been to turn that on its head. By reinvesting time saved through AI into upskilling, creativity and leadership, we’re not just using technology to get ahead – we’re using it to lift others with us. The AI Dividend Fund isn’t just about giving back hours; it’s about giving back agency.
And as a team led by women, that matters deeply. One of the key investment streams of our program is leadership, because if the future of work is being reshaped by AI, then women need to be the ones shaping it. Every hour we spend developing the next generation of female leaders is an act of equity in motion.
So while some businesses are using AI to shrink their teams, we’re using it to expand what’s possible for ours. Because the future of work doesn’t have to mean doing more with less – it can mean doing better with what we have.
AI will keep changing how we work. But it’s women in leadership who will define why we work – and what kind of world we build with the time we’re given back.