COBOL dev won .Net hackathon with help from AI – and their CIO loves it

The CIO of Australia’s taxation office (ATO) is letting administrative staff use Microsoft’s Copilot for everyday activities, in the hope it pays off by helping them to develop skills, and ideas, that eventually improve its core services.

“We are getting AI into the hands of as many workers as possible to build the muscle,” ATO CIO Mark Sawade said at analyst firm Gartner’s annual IT Symposium on Monday.

The CIO said the ATO is already familiar with AI.

“We have been doing forms of machine learning and deep analytics for fraud for the better part of a decade,” he said, mentioning fraud detection as one application for the tech.

For now, he’s not letting generative or agentic AI near those processes or other core activities.

“We are using Copilot to just speed up some everyday activities,” the CIO added, saying he hopes that improves AI literacy and perhaps develops skills that lead to AI-powered improvements to core processes.

Sawade said he doesn’t expect allowing admin staff to work with Copilot will improve efficiency or produce obvious return on investment.

Instead, he hopes to develop ROE – “return on employee.” “You will develop the muscle you need to learn how to improve business processes,” he said.

The ATO’s developer team gives him confidence this strategy can work.

The CIO said the ATO operates many technology platforms of different vintages, from mainframe to Java, and recently staged an internal hackathon during which a COBOL developer emerged triumphant after using GitHub Copilot.

“He had never coded a line of C# or anything in the .Net framework in his life,” Sawade said.

“That showed us the ability to transcend some of the detail, how someone who understands core concepts can use generative AI to work in a domain they have never looked at before is really powerful.” Sawade’s ambitions for AI are considerable.

He pointed to the fact that the paper-based tax return forms Australia used in the 1990s took six hours to complete, compared to the 12 minutes taxpayers now spend using the ATO’s app and online service.

He hopes AI can help the ATO to deliver similar improvements, especially for businesses whose tax affairs are more complex.