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.
