The AI Signal vs the Noise
What Educators Actually Need to Respond to Right Now
The Skills Forecast · Episode 1 · with Toby George Jones, Founder, Knowello
The AI conversation in 2026 is loud, contradictory, and often unhelpful. Australian companies are announcing thousands of job cuts and pointing to AI as the cause — but the data tells a more complicated story. In this opening episode of The Skills Forecast, Kerri Buttery sits down with Toby George Jones, founder of Knowello and one of Australia's most practical voices on AI in education, to cut through the hype and get to the signal that actually matters: what's really changing, what educators and training providers need to respond to, and what's safe to ignore.
“It's not that they've all of a sudden built the capability to have 10,000 agents doing the work others previously did. It's the cause of that because of how they're spending their funds — not because AI's replacing them.”
- Toby George Jones, Founder, Knowello
Five things worth taking away
1. AI isn't the layoffs villain the headlines suggest — cost-cutting is, and AI is the label.
Toby's read on the roughly 4,500 tech and corporate job cuts in the first ten weeks of 2026: most weren't AI actually replacing the work — they were balance-sheet decisions, made to fund the billions going into AI infrastructure, with AI as the convenient explanation. His proof point: a fintech and CommBank both cut customer service roles expecting AI to cover the gap, then had to walk it back or rehire once the tool couldn't do what the job actually needed.
2. Trust breaks the moment AI isn't disclosed — not the moment it's used.
The erosion happens when an organisation isn't upfront that a bot is involved, especially once it makes a visible mistake. Toby's fix: give people a genuine choice and an escalation path — "call this number for a human, or this one for an instant AI answer" — rather than funnelling everyone into AI and pretending it's equivalent.
3. Assessment has to be redesigned around AI, not policed against it.
Short-answer tasks are effectively dead — AI can complete them in seconds. Toby's alternative: project-based assessment that captures the student's process (the prompts they used, the sources they evaluated, what they kept and what they discarded), backed by a short competency conversation to confirm real understanding — not just the final polished output.
4. The real risk is the entry-level ladder disappearing, not senior jobs.
If AI absorbs the repetitive, entry-level work people have historically used to build judgement — in accounting, hospitality, contact centres — organisations risk losing the pipeline of people who can tell when an AI output is wrong. Toby's warning: without that lived experience, a junior's only real option is to agree with whatever the AI gives them.
5. One concrete action for leaders this week.
Pick a single, well-defined process you already do — not an organisation-wide AI overhaul — and ask an AI tool how that one process could get 10% easier or faster. Toby's own example: a scheduled Copilot prompt that pulls his week's activity from email, documents and meetings, so he's not manually reconstructing his weekly report from memory.
Where the conversation goes
00:00 The Skills Forecast – Episode 1: AI and the Future of Work
12:52 Customer Service, Chatbots & the Cost of Replacing Humans
Watch or listen
Watch on YouTube: The Skills Forecast — Episode 1
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
About the guest
Toby George Jones is the founder of Knowello, an AI adoption consultancy working across education, training and business. He helps organisations move from AI policy and governance through to practical, everyday implementation — and has spent fifteen-plus years tracking technology across the UK and Australia.
What's next
Episode 2 of The Skills Forecast is in August 2026 — Kerri talks with Andrew Shea about the VET sector at a crossroads. Register for the next live session, or subscribe on your podcast platform of choice so you don't miss it.