74% of Australian Sole Traders Now Use AI. Most Start With Admin.

74 per cent of Australian sole traders now use AI tools. That is roughly 1.3 million people — up from 58 per cent two years ago.

Australia has an estimated 1.7 million sole traders — contractors, consultants, freelancers, gig workers, and tradespeople with ABNs. They are the country's largest category of self-employed workers, and the data suggests they are adopting AI faster than businesses with employees.

The latest Hnry Sole Trader Pulse, conducted by Resolve Strategic in March 2026 across a nationally representative sample of more than 500 sole traders, found that regular AI use for work more than doubled in under two years: from 18 per cent in June 2024 to 37 per cent by March 2026. Business use climbed from 49 per cent to 69 per cent over the same period. This is not a future trend. It has already happened — largely without anyone planning it.

Sole traders do not have IT departments, transformation budgets, or six-month pilot programs. They have a problem, a tool, and a decision to make before tomorrow's first job.

That constraint turns out to be an advantage. The Hnry data shows 41 per cent of sole traders use AI daily or weekly. Positive sentiment toward AI rose from 34 per cent in 2024 to 56 per cent in March 2026. When you are the one who benefits directly from the time saved, scepticism does not last long.

Adoption was highest among consultants at 80 per cent, followed by freelancers and health and wellness professionals at 72 per cent. Tradespeople and contractors sat at 62 per cent — lower than the desk-based cohorts, but a clear majority nonetheless.

OpenAI was the most-used platform among Hnry customers, followed by Anthropic and Gemini. These are general-purpose tools, not industry-specific software — which tells you something about how sole traders are approaching AI. They are not waiting for purpose-built solutions. They are fitting general tools to specific problems.

Joe Tomalin is a handyman and gardener on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula. He uses AI for job estimating, email drafting, and business planning. Before AI, he spent around ten hours a week on admin. Now it takes two.

That is eight hours returned to billable work or personal time — every single week. At a loaded rate of $95 per hour, those eight hours represent roughly $39,500 a year in recovered opportunity cost.

In Melbourne, graphic designer Simon Hart reported that AI made him the equivalent of a team of five, accelerating his output by 300 per cent. Different profession, same pattern: AI removes the bottleneck between doing the work and running the business.

This is the admin leverage case in its purest form.

62 per cent of tradespeople using AI sounds high — and it is, compared with industry surveys showing far lower rates of embedded AI use among trade contractors. The difference is what counts as adoption.

Using ChatGPT to draft a client email is AI adoption. Systematically using AI to estimate jobs, generate compliance documents, chase outstanding invoices, and respond to customer enquiries is AI integration. Most sole traders are still in the first camp.

The Hnry data reinforces this: spending on AI tools among its customers has doubled annually since 2023, but from a low base. Sole traders who start experimenting quickly find enough value to pay for better tools — the question is whether they progress beyond convenience to genuine operational leverage.

The biggest returns are going to people who pointed AI at the right problem first. Admin work — quoting, invoicing, compliance, email — is the consistent entry point because it is repetitive, time-bound, and does not require deep domain judgement. Once admin is under control, the next move is customer-facing: quoting faster, responding to enquiries sooner, following up on leads that would otherwise go cold.

If you are a sole trader who has not started, pick the admin task you dread most. For most people that is quoting, invoicing, or end-of-day paperwork. Run one AI tool alongside your manual process for a fortnight. Track the time difference.

If you have already started, ask yourself whether you are using AI for convenience or for leverage. Convenience saves minutes. Leverage — the kind Joe Tomalin found — saves hours. The difference usually comes down to pointing AI at a workflow, not just a task.

Key takeaways

Using AI for convenience — or for leverage?

A short conversation can help you identify which workflows in your business would benefit most from AI — and which tools would deliver the biggest time savings. Book a call.