Almost two dozen federal government agencies using artificial intelligence were without internal policies governing its use last year, and more than 40 had no assurance arrangements in place, an audit has revealed.
The audit, published on Thursday, also shows that the number of agencies using the rapidly advancing technology in their operations more than doubled in the 12 months to July 2024, climbing from 27 to 56.
The more than two-fold increase in use comes as the national auditor steps up its checks of AI governance, with the first-ever audit into the use of AI at one of Canberra’s biggest agencies due in the coming weeks.
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It’s worth noting that the adoption of AI is actually fairly limited. We are talking inbuilt features to Teams etc. to write transcripts and summaries of meetings, and similar type uses. We are also talking machine learning projects that do deep statistical analysis. We are not really talking about AI-driven decision making in any real form.
Any pre-built (COTS/SaaS) solution will still go through all the standard security rigour and ChatGPT and others remain blocked by many departments.