INTHEBLACK July 2026 - Magazine - Page 52
WORK SMART
From digital literacy
to fluency
LISTEN
to this story
Digital transformation continues to
deliver plenty of tools and efficiencies,
so why are teams still stitching systems
together by hand?
Words Megan Breen
WHEN SIMON LESCH, APAC AI AND TRANSFORMATION LEAD
at Archetype, speaks with finance teams about how they use
digital tools, he hears a familiar story: organisations are not
short on technology, they are just trying to determine which
tools add value and how they should work together.
The issue often is not access, it is more about capability
and understanding what is possible, he says. “There is no
shortage of options, and each promises to solve everything.
But if people are not trained to use the full capabilities
of a platform, or key features are not enabled, they quickly
become overwhelmed and organisations fail to realise
the full value of their investment.”
While most professionals are digitally literate, true digital
fluency comes from understanding how systems connect and
using that insight to build smarter, more efficient workflows.
In many organisations, the technology stack is doing its job,
but the gap lies in integration, where manual processes
continue to bridge systems that do not naturally align.
Tyler Wise FCPA, partner at Findex and a member
of CPA Australia’s Digital Transformation Centre of Excellence,
sees the same pattern.
“The tools are already there: spreadsheets, dashboards
and reporting platforms. Yet in many organisations, they
are used in isolation and are patched together by manual
steps, workarounds and duplicated effort,” he says.
The issue, Wise argues, is not basic capability, but the
gap between knowing how to use tools and using them
well together. It is the difference between being digitally
literate and fluent, he adds.
“Digital fluency is about understanding how systems
fit together and using that to design workflows that are
52 INTHEBLACK July 2026
connected, automated and scalable,” he says. “More broadly,
it is the ability to lead how technology is applied and to
embed that thinking across an organisation.”
AI IN ENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENTS
Fluency also shows up in how embedded tools are used.
Rather than relying on external systems and manual transfers,
there is a shift toward artificial intelligence (AI) built directly
into the platforms people already work in, says Lesch.
“For many years, AI sat outside core workflows. It was
treated as an external tool and you would step out of your
primary system, generate outputs and then manually bring
those insights back into your day-to-day platforms,” he says.
That separation created obvious inefficiencies, he adds,
and only recently have major providers begun to close
the gap. Tools such as Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini
are increasingly being integrated directly into enterprise
environments.
“Instead of switching between systems, users can now
access AI directly inside the applications they already work
in by opening a side panel, querying data and generating
outputs without leaving the platform,” Lesch says. “It is
a shift that fundamentally reduces friction and brings
AI closer to where the work actually happens.”
REVIEW WORKFLOW STRUCTURES
Wise points to a common accounting workflow as an
example of where many organisations still fall short.
“In many cases, you will see someone using Excel for
PivotTables and data manipulation, and then move that
output into Power BI, largely for presentation,” he says.
“It works, but it is still a fairly linear, manual process.”
A more fluent approach starts by questioning the structure
of that workflow itself.
“This is where you start asking different questions: what
can be automated, how those tools can be better integrated
and whether you are really pushing the existing platforms
to their limits,” Wise says. “In some cases, particularly where
there is valuable proprietary data, that might even mean
