COBOL Dev Won .NET Hackathon With Help From AI - and Their CIO Loves It
The Register, Tuesday, September 15th, 2026
Australia's tax office deploys Copilot broadly not for ROI but for 'return on employee,' and a COBOL dev proved the point.
Australian Taxation Office CIO Mark Sawade told Gartner's IT Symposium that he is putting Copilot in the hands of as many administrative workers as possible to build the organizational muscle for AI, while deliberately keeping generative and agentic AI away from core services and the fraud detection systems the ATO has run on machine learning for a decade.
He does not expect obvious efficiency gains or ROI from the rollout, framing the goal instead as return on employee: developing the skills that later improve business processes.
The concrete evidence came from an internal hackathon where a COBOL developer won using GitHub Copilot, despite never having written a line of C# or anything in .NET.