Building sovereign AI infrastructure should be a first order priority within the Albanese government’s second term productivity agenda, Australian Computer Society chief executive Josh Griggs says.
The development of national AI capability would be a fundamental input to productivity improvements, Mr Griggs said, and building the digital infrastructure to support that capability cannot be left entirely to massive investments by multinational hyperscalers.
The government and local business interests would need to co-invest $2 billion to $4 billion to build a level of sovereign AI capability and AI infrastructure that would allow Australia to “keep a foot in the door” of AI opportunities.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, Josh Griggs discusses the AI opportunity and the policy pathways for taking advantages of those opportunities.
It is not enough to rely on the large-scale investments of the hyperscalers, he says.
While companies like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services have announced investment plans worth tens of billions in the AI and data centre operations, Mr Griggs says “the question we need to be asking is: ‘what are they seeing that we’re not seeing’?”
“If they are prepared to put – let’s call it $20 billion – into the Australian economy, the return that they’ve taken out of the Australian economy is going to be at least three times that,” Mr Griggs said. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t be investing the money.”
“We need to ensure that we have a capability that is not reliant on international companies who can turn things on and off when they please, and use our data to forward themselves, as opposed to us using our data to forward our imperatives as a country.
As the professional association for the tech sector, the Australian Computer Society is focused on skills, and the development of a pipeline of professionals to work in the industry.
Mr Griggs said there was a lot of work to be done on building the technology skills that will drive the government’s productivity agenda, and in particular will enable Australia’s sovereign AI development.
Since he joined the ACS as chief executive a year-and-a-half ago, the organisation has been spending time engaging with government and industry on developing policy that drives the best outcomes for the country.
“We feel that there are a couple of really big areas. One is in skills, and ensuring that we have the right skills in the industry and enough skilled people in the country to ensure our ongoing competitiveness,” Mr Grigg said.
“Another key area of focus is around commercialisation – ensuring that intellectual property and companies stay within Australia, and that they are able to thrive and grow from here.”
“And those two things dovetail into productivity, which is a key area of focus to the government, which is a good thing.”
Mr Griggs said a key challenge for Australia in keeping IP and startup companies in this country would be in solving ongoing access-to-capital issues.
“[This] is about enabling connection to money for startups and scale ups, in particular when they have already got a viable product but they do not yet have annuity revenue streams,” he said.
“Plugging that gap in the market [is important]. Because our financial markets, whilst very good, are quite conservative. They don’t like pre-revenue kind of investments.
“And to plug that gap means de-risking it from a financial market perspective but also providing the government with an opportunity to co-invest in those areas,” Mr Griggs said.
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