Economic Impact of Generative AI - Responsible AI Network (RAIN) webinar
Hello everyone. Welcome to our webinar this morning. My name is Beth Worrel on behalf of the National AI Center. I'd like to welcome you today to today's webinar, and we will explore the economic impact of generative AI with the Tech Council of Australia and with Microsoft.
But first, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet today. I would also like to pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. I would also like to acknowledge the many indigenous people we have working in the fields of science, technology and artificial intelligence here in Australia.
They strengthen and advance our industries and communities every day through their contributions. In terms of the agenda for today's session. I will be talking very quickly about the National AI Center and provide you with an overview of what it is that we do. I'll provide a quick update on the air safety standard, and then we'll move to an overview of the economic impact of generative AI with the Tech Council and with Microsoft. There will be an opportunity to provide questions.
Please use the chat function in the webcast and we will get to as many questions as we can. This session will also be recorded and available on our YouTube channel after the event. So in terms of the National II Center, we were funded by the Australian Government about a year ago and our ambition is to accelerate the positive AI adoption and innovation that benefits Australia's business and community. So we are all about advancing AI adoption. We have a big focus on small and medium size businesses that really focus on all Australian businesses and we also focus on helping to grow Australia's own AI suffering capability. We live within the CSIRO and after 61 and I want to acknowledge many of the colleagues that we have on today's call and we love working with you.
I also want to acknowledge the many partners that we have as part of our work, in particular our foundation partners, Google and CEDA. We're very grateful for your support in terms of what it is that we do. We most importantly work very, very closely with industry to better understand what we can do and where we might focus. We have three strands of work that we do as part of the main program of activity. We support organized auctions, particularly small and medium sized businesses to get started with. I understand what it might be and how it might be beneficial to their organization.
We also work across our ecosystem of startups and scale ups to grow and strengthen Australia's own A.I. sovereign capability. And there's some incredible businesses emerging from Australia of which we can all be proud. And there's more that we can do to help buy from these Australian businesses and better understand what our success and strengths are as an industry. We have a discoverability portal that you can find on our KNAKE website that gives you a real amazing experience of some of the organizations that we have here in Australia and then we exist to uplift practice. So we are very focused on advancing responsible and safe practices through the responsible air network and that is the program that I manage.
So we have seven pillars of activity and focus across law standards, design, leadership principles, technology and governance. And we work very closely with as a set of knowledge partners to create tools and templates, resources, events and more that helped us better understand what we can do in a practical way to ensure that responsible use of AI is not only something that we do here in Australia, but is our international opportunity to compete. We think that this is a huge opportunity not only economically but also from a social point of view as well. If you would like any further information about the responsible AI network or to be part of this community, please do get in touch with us. I want to also provide a quick update on the air safety standards so many of you are aware that the Australian Government undertook a safe and responsible air consultation last year.
Last month the Government released an interim response and in this document four actions were outlined, including new mandatory guardrails for organizations developing and deploying air systems in high risk settings. The establishment of an interim expert advisory group to support the government's development of options for guardrails, labeling and watermarking of air generated material in high risk settings. And a voluntary air safety standard to provide industry with a practical, voluntary best practice toolkit. Now, this is the piece of work that Nycc will be co-leading with the support of the Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
We will be working very, very closely with Australia's air ecosystems and organizations that are working in this space, as well as industry representatives to develop this safety standard. And this will also be aligned with the Government's Air Assurance Framework. The Air Safety Standard aims to be a single source of guidance for the Australian, for Australian industries and businesses, for the development, adaption and adoption of air in a safe, responsible way. We want to provide Australian businesses with a.
Structured approach. To ensure that air systems and services are designed, built and used safely and responsibly. Now of course, this is an ongoing, evolving piece of work. So if you're organization wants any more information, wants to get involved in any particular way, please let us know. So with that, we want to move into the main substance of today's webinar.
Now, if you were anything like me, you may have focused or been following some of the stories that emerged from Davos. So the activity and events that took place in Switzerland in January of this year. Now we heard all manner of different numbers being bandied about.
But suffice to say, organizations, industry leaders and governments are extremely excited about the economic opportunity that I commerces for businesses and countries all around the world. There was a report last year that the Council produced that explored this for Australia, and that is that the main focus of today's event. Now it's pretty exciting to see that generative. I might create a $115 billion opportunity for Australia's economy by 2030, which is a huge figure and there's a lot to do. And we are very excited today to have two guest speakers to give us a little more detail about this report and how this opportunity might be realized for Australia. We are joined today by Scarlett McDermott, who's the head of ecosystem capability for the Tech Council of Australia.
Thank you for your time. And Kate Siewert, who is the manager for AI and Economic Impact for corporate for Microsoft Australia, is part of the corporate, external and legal affairs team. So with that, I'd like to hand over first to Kate, who will be providing us with an intro to today's session.
Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much, Beth. And delighted to have the opportunity to join Scarlett on behalf of the TCA and the National Ice Center today to talk about this report that we did in the middle of last year. I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands from which we are all joining this call and to acknowledge any First Nations people who are joining us today. I have Curly, graying hair, hazel eyes, white skin with freckles and wearing a navy blue top. My pronouns are she and her.
And one of my favorite things to do year round is to swim in the cold Victorian ocean. As we start the new year. It's an incredible time to reflect on the extraordinary year that 2023 was.
Summer holidays always give us a time to pause and think about the year that's been. And I think if we think back to this time last year, it's quite stark how much the conversation and the technology have come. We will look back on last year as one of the most rapid and simply groundbreaking periods of technological advancement in human history. At Microsoft, we consider this era as conflict essential as the advent of the printing press hundreds of years ago, or in more recent memory, the Internet or the smartphone generated by AI Technologies are going to mean just as much for societies and economies and people as those technological advancements of recent past.
And that's why it's so important that we get things right. That means achieving a balance between risk management and fast adoption, ensuring technologies are meeting societal expectations of safety and responsibility, as well as equity of opportunity. Now, this report was completed last year.
There's been a huge development in terms of the products available to leverage large language models. And I know we have a large group on the call today. Some of you like me might already be using enterprise generated AI products in your daily work and seeing the benefits. I'm using copilots every single day. Some of you might be considering how to introduce these technologies to your organizations.
Others might be exploring the utility of consumer versions of general AI products and understanding what might more be possible. And some of you might have no experience at all. And this is your first foray into the topic. So welcome. Now, when the Tech Council and Microsoft decided to do this research last year, there were some key questions we wanted to explore. The first was what is the potential economic opportunity that generative I could deliver for Australia? Where are these benefits going to come from? What makes Australia well-positioned to harness this moment and what will it take to get there? So now let's dove in and both, if you can move to the next slide, please.
So that first question, what is the potential economic opportunity for Australia? The results of the economic modeling were really quite staggering. As you can see here, we modeled three different scenarios and these scenarios were based on the pace of adoption of the technologies in the Australian economy. Now you can see in a slow paced adoption scenario, Australia could gain $45 billion of economic value each year by 2030. A medium faced adoption scenario, $75 billion.
And in the fast pace scenario, Australia stands to gain $115 billion of economic value each year by the year 2030. To put this into some context, that's a range of 2 to 5% of GDP. And the other important thing to note is this is neither a minimum nor a maximum. It's just scenarios of what could be possible if we capture this moment though, to break this down a little bit, where are these benefits going to come from? To do this analysis, we looked at two categories of benefits. The first was improvements to existing industries, and the second was new opportunities, new businesses, products, services, jobs that don't yet exist in our economy. And you can see from this chart, the research results are really quite, quite profound.
The bulk of the opportunities lie in productivity gains. And we know that this is a major challenge facing our economy at the moment. To break down this chart in a slightly different way. Those productivity gains comprise 70% of the potential benefits. We're going to see another 20% of benefit come from quality gains improvement to existing services and tasks. And then 10% of the potential value are going to come from those new products and services I mentioned just before.
And in fact, this aligns with how we're seeing generative AI already being used and indeed how I'm using it myself in my day to day work. Many of the benefits are going to be solving huge problems. But we're also going to see a huge amount of value out of the more pedestrian tasks. Improvements to the drudge work that each of us do each day.
So to put this in some sort of more tangible examples, this is helping with better note taking or summaries to carve minutes off a task, hours a a week that will end up freeing up time for more higher order value and higher value tasks. So if we look at the next slide, the way we did this analysis is by looking at data from the Occupational Information Network or NET, which provides information on the tasks that are undertaken in each occupation. So on average, 22% of task hours have high potential for automation using generative AI. So these are tasks that are routine in nature and have well-defined parameters. So examples here are synthesizing documents or large text based sources, reconciling data or transcription.
Another 22% of task hours demonstrate high potential for augmentation using generative AI. So these are tasks that generated by AI will. Assist. With but still necessitate human input or involvement in some way. And so for these sorts. Of tasks.
The gendered I will act as a copilot, amplifying a worker's expertize to improve the quality of what they're doing. So again, some examples of tasks that might fall into this category are inspecting the quality of products, evaluating the accuracy of data, explanations of policies and procedures, or the preparation of more technical documents. The remaining task hours that we analyzed were not included in the potential benefit because these were found to have either low or no potential for automation or augmentation.
And so these are tasks that a worker does that are either less routine in nature or not discretely defined and require more proactive effort from a human. Such tasks could include directing organizational activities, evaluating personnel capabilities, or interpersonal tasks more generally. And this portion also includes physical or manual tasks.
Now, it's important to remember that these are averages and they provide an overall view of the impact of generative AI on workers across the economy. However, different occupations are impacted to different extents. All industries, however, and scale will go into this a bit further. We'll have an opportunity to use these technologies in some ways. So the next question what makes Australia really well positioned to harness this moment? Australia has lots of advantages that make us particularly well-placed in the era of AI.
So again, we'll use this same framing to break it down. First of all, in terms of improvements to existing industries, and that's that 90% of the potential value where we have a comparative advantage is in four key ways. First, we have a tech workforce that's currently over 900,000 workers strong and growing towards our goal of 1.2
million tech workers by 2030. These workers provide the strong foundations that our economy needs for the development and adoption of generative by the Tech Council has done a huge amount of research and ongoing tracking of these numbers and how we're going to get there. And so I'd refer you to the Tech Council's website for some more information and research in this field. Second, we have stable regulatory settings. We have a government that's really engaged with consulting with industry as it takes on its regulatory approach and more engaging in international standards and other norms settings.
Beth gave a great outline of this at the start, so I won't go that into that any further. Thirdly, we have high cloud adoption in Australia. The Australian private sector and government are already cloud adopters and this creates the right foundations for the integration of generative across all processes and for realizing these benefits. Late last year, Mandala Partners released some great research on hyperscale cloud and what it means for the Australian economy. And I'd refer you to that. And I believe the team will provide a link for you to access.
Finally, we've got great investment already and growing investment in digital infrastructure. This includes the data centers that fuel the cloud, the ability to have high speed Internet reach more and more businesses and households and communities across our country. And these are really crucial to ensuring that we derive the benefits generated by AI in all four corners of Australia. And next, in terms of the comparative advantage to create new products and services, we have a strong tech sector and an existing tech ecosystem and a thriving startup culture. And again, Tech Council has got lots of information on this to frame that in terms of the opportunity there.
Australia has deep established world class research institutions. We're doing globally leading research not just in AI and machine learning, but importantly into areas and industries that have great potential to gain from these technologies. To think of some examples here, think about our medical research capability or our advanced manufacturing research. We are in geographically beautifully placed. We are sitting in the world's fastest growing economic region in Asia. But we also have the benefit of deep and long standing partnerships with the US, the UK and the EU.
And finally, the government has supported policies to foster a culture of innovation, to bring our ecosystem and startup startups to life. Again, there's lots of there's lots of policies that I could point to, and Scarlett is probably better placed to do this. But I'm thinking here things like the recent migration strategy or the National Reconstruction Fund. And just before I hand over to Scarlett, we go to the next slide. What will it take to get there? And just as we need to focus on the opportunities that these technologies bring, we also need to be clear eyed about the challenges and the risks. Responsible AI is obviously paramount.
And as Beth said, the National AI Center is doing a huge amount of work there, as is Microsoft. And I've provided some resources if you want to dove a little more deeply into Microsoft responsible AI practices. These are built on our responsible AI principles of fairness, privacy and security, reliability and safety, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability. But in order to capture the opportunities generated by the users need to have trust in the technologies. And that trust will come from developers, déployés and consumers delivering on responsible AI principles. Scarlett, I'll hand it over to you to go into a bit more what it will take to get there.
Thanks so much, Kate. And thanks, everyone who has joined us for giving us a little bit of your time today. These kinds of events are really important for us to get the word out a bit more broadly across a range of different businesses and industry sectors. About the opportunity that generative biotech presents here in Australia.
Look, as Kate mentioned, I'll kick us into a little bit more detail on some of the things that we need to do to drive that adoption. And the first area that I wanted to speak to you about is about skills in the workforce. And you can see here on this slide just some descriptions of five different ways that generative AI is already co piloting work. So I won't speak directly to each of these.
I'll let you kind of have a read through those. And Kate really clearly went through for us that description between the difference of automating and augmenting. And that's a really important thing for us to understand that for the most part, augmentation is going to be the way that many workers in Australia experience generative AI on a day to day basis.
Of course we can't wave a magic wand and have everybody just pick these things up immediately. That's a lot of work that actually goes into developing and deploying new systems. But really importantly, a lot of work that goes into making sure that the workforce is ready to actually maximize the use of those and to be comfortable and familiar with those systems. And so the first aspect that we call out in the report in terms of the challenge that we face on the PayPal side of adopting generative AI is executive understanding and understanding. How can we link a business strategy and outcomes that we're trying to achieve in being a competitive and successful business with these tools? And so that's really important that we're building up that executive knowledge at the C-suite level to be able to do that.
And example of ways we can do that is actually what we're doing right here today. So the great news is we're already doing it and you're already doing it. So thanks again for coming along. But there's also a lot of other industry knowledge sharing that goes on, and that's one of the great advantages of doing business here in Australia is that we have a very generous and a very open innovation ecosystem here. So the Tech Council runs many events that help to showcase great innovation work that's happening here, and you can get involved with that through us. But it's also programs like the National II Center who run a lot of fantastic open events.
Secondly, and perhaps most critically, is the workforce, the people that we're asking to use these tools every day. It's really critical that we make sure that they're well supported in doing that. So if you're thinking about introducing artificial intelligence tools generated by AI in particular into your workforce, I'd I'd really strongly recommend that you think about who's going to be impacted by that. And you can even take it to the level of updating the job descriptions of the roles that we think will be affected. And if you were to hire somebody into that role today, what qualifications might you want them to have? And then you really do need to do a bit of a gap assessment. They're looking at the people who are already in those roles.
What are you now asking them to do and have you supported them to bridge that gap? So have you supported them to seek that further education or to be upskilled on the tools that you introduced? The worst thing we can do is assume that all of the workers in our business will already know how to use these things because we have such a variety of access to digital technologies and people use that to a really differing level. So if you're looking at different ways to help your staff upskill, I would strongly recommend looking at vendor certifications based on the specific tools you're asking them to use, but also look at alternate pathways you may not have considered like Taif. So the Institute of Technology Digital is a fantastic example of a way to do I Might Grow credentials in a way that can be done part time work and study at the same time to support our workforce. But if we jump to the next slide now, but this one's looking at how can we make sure that we're making generative access so well, not just for the largest businesses in Australia, but for all businesses in Australia. You can see on the slide here the different industries that we've called out in the report and the opportunity that we think is possible in those sectors based on the different scenarios that we analyzed.
And you see there we've called out healthcare, manufacturing, retail and professional and financial services. But it's important to recognize, of course, that the majority of businesses that exist in Australia as many businesses. So when we're looking at these big billion dollar numbers, you know, that can feel like maybe only talking about big business. But the reality is that's a cumulative total across the many, many businesses that exist here in Australia. Now there's some fantastic initiatives going on to make sure that these tools and knowledge are accessible to SMEs across the country.
And you may have recently seen the Government has grant applications that have just closed or adopt hubs that will be established across the country with the express goal of making sure that we are facilitating small to medium enterprises, adopting AI into their businesses. And again, that will help us to realize those productivity gains, but also to to make sure that we're not leaving anyone behind in that transformation, which is really critical. The National Center I would also call that as a fantastic resource. If you're in SMB and you're thinking about how can I get started in integrating these kinds of tools across my business? And there's a lot of open resources on their hub there. And of course you can also touch in the TGA website in our research area there as well. If you don't mind, Beth will just jump to the next slide.
Now again, this is a pretty big slide. So what I wanted to show you here is just another excerpt of the report kind of getting to that tangible level of, okay, I was saying that there's this always benefits for business and there's a lot of productivity gain we can see. And you can see here on the slide, we're looking at a sector deep dove for professional and financial services that could add 5 to $13 billion a year to the Australian economy. But this slide kind of takes us to that next level of detail of what components of professions that we're talking about and how can we actually implement different specific applications of generated by that are going to produce that productivity benefit.
Now I've just seen a note that you may not be able to see this slide in the webcast right now. So if you can't, that's fine. We will send it out to you afterwards. But the important thing I wanted to highlight from the report is that there's three areas that businesses really need to examine before we can implement these kinds of tools. So the first is data.
The second is people, which we've just talked about briefly, and the third is organizational level structures and capabilities. So in terms of data fundamentals, you know, there's actually a really good meme going around and usually a reference means in a formal sitting here, but it's got a staircase and somebody stepping from the bottom stair right up to the top stair and the top stairs level generated by AI tools. And in between that we've actually got the basics of data fundamentals.
We've got deep learning and analytics about data. And the point here is that you can't just step over some of the, you know, the more traditional, perhaps more mundane parts of the data foundations that are required to be able to implement these tools. So really, you're looking at taking your first steps into generative A.I.. I'd encourage you to look at your business, what not to do. You have what data do you think you could get from elsewhere that would help you to deliver your services or your products in a in a better way or a more efficient way? But we can't just produce AI models that don't have a really solid foundation of data to use. Secondly, I mentioned people, we've talked a lot about that.
So there's certainly the education component, but it's also helping to bring people along on a change journey and that's no different to change management that I'm sure you're already doing in your businesses. Just helping people to understand what does the future state look like and what's their role in that future state as well. And helping them to be involved as the process evolves. And finally, it's that organizational readiness.
Any time that we're looking at implementing a large technology change, whether it's AI or it's not A.I., it's really important that we understand the business process we are applying that to. So if you're thinking, okay, I could be implementing generative AI in my sales pipeline great was met that the pipeline and understand actually which are the points where we're doing a lot of manual work that might be a great use case for generative I rather than starting with a quote generated by it what we found and trying to find a place to shove it into our process.
So that will help you to get a really sustainable implementation and you'll see a really strong return on investment if you put the, you know, the time and the work into doing that foundational component. Another really important organizational readiness step is looking at risk management. What do you already have in terms of a risk management framework in your business? And how can you apply that to generative AI or other technologies that you're implementing? So here we need to look at things like privacy, what we already got in place in terms about, you know, perhaps up terms of service for customers who are using the service where we're looking to implement and ensuring that we're in just that we're updating those things and making sure we've got that transparency. But also, you know, looking at updating your disaster recovery or your business continuity planning as you're evolving these tools that you're using. So none of this stuff is groundbreaking.
And, you know, actually, a lot of the same business fundamentals apply when we're doing a big AI implementation as when we're doing any of the kind of change through business process. And look back, I'll leave it there. I know that we're still having some trouble with the slides, but just to recap, it's really important that we take a strong look at the people component that we're making sure we're supporting our workforce and we're supporting SMEs in adopting these tools so that we can only forward with these tools together and will experience that productivity benefit. Thank you so much, Scarlett, and thank you, Kate. That was fantastic.
And as a person who's very passionately about skills and potential and supporting people along this journey, I fully agree that these are opportunity for us to to support people on this on this journey. And I'm very excited by the possibility of actually creating more meaningful employment and opportunities to give people a chance to to be more productive at work. Certainly, I have already benefitted and become more productive thanks to some of the AI tools that I'm using. And it's yeah, it's exciting to to see. But I guess the question is, and especially having watched and read a lot from Davos, there's a real sense that organizations and countries are moving ahead with this.
It's no longer is it a nice to have people. I'm really seeing this as an opportunity to get ahead, to address maybe some of the challenges that their country faces. What do you think you are seeing from adoption? The pace that Australia is is going at and you know, how do we compare, do you think, to some of the other countries that they're already seeing at quite advanced in this area? And maybe I'll ask Scarlett.
Can I ask you that question? Yeah, no problem at all. So I've actually got some research from IBM here in front of me showing in spring 2022. So it's a little a little bit out of date now that we're in 2024, which I have to keep remembering, is the year that we're currently in as we come to the end of January. But that shows that Australia is actually adopting AI in business at a faster rate than many of our global peers. We're certainly not. You know, the the leader actually sees Singapore is leading in deploying those technologies. But
you know, Australia is even ahead of the United States in terms of how quickly businesses are picking up and deploying those tools here. So it's really encouraging to see that that initial uplift and that initial experimentation and seeing what we can do and I think that's really key to innovating on, you know, the many different business sectors that are going to adopt this is being able to give it a try, see what's working and what's not working, and then do that next iteration. And as we said, that sort of from 2022, which is really when we started seeing this huge uplift and I'm looking forward to seeing the future refreshes of that data. But Kate, you might have some insights into that as well.
Yeah, I just say to reflect on what we're seeing and hearing from our customers is there's not just a voracious appetite. It is a voracious appetite to to deploy, but to deploy it responsibly to get it right. But certainly we're seeing, you know, a huge amount of interest and now lots and lots of application of these technologies, including by the government who have announced that they're doing a trial of copilot products.
So I think as I sort of outline from the report, we're in a really good position to adopt quickly because of those foundational aspects in our economy as well. Yeah, fantastic. And I think Salesforce came out with some really interesting research around adoption of AI services in Australia, and it seemed to suggest that even if organizations didn't already have a policy around AI adoption, people were using these tools anyway.
So I found that quite an interesting one. And in regard to your report, it did certainly take an economic lens, which I thought was obviously the point. But when you think about the impact of AI, it's it's inevitably going to be on the people, on people, you know, it will change jobs and it will change industries. I wonder if he had any thoughts or points of view in regards to the potential impact the AI might might have on Australian people and communities.
And maybe Kate, would would that be one for you? Yeah, I can I can jump in there. I think about it in terms of where we've got a scarcity of finite human resources there being actually amazing benefits from these technologies. Thinking here, you know, for example, health care where we know we've got shortages in key roles or as kids go back to school this week, we're hearing a lot more in just the last week about teacher shortages. Now, of course, and everything I am wanting to find here is under the foundation of responsible AI principles and making sure you are applying these technologies with all the right safeguards in place.
But I think the human impact, the positive human impact in some sectors where those interpersonal interactions are so crucial to the experience of the patient or the student, in the case of education and health care means that you have these abilities now to free up those professionals, to be engaging in the parts of the work that's adding the greatest value and spending less time on the administrative or the drudge work that takes them away from the key tasks that they and we want them to be doing as a society and as an economy. To touch on the downsides. I think we do see with any new technology, there's always going to be shifts and there's always going to be some impacts on certain roles more than others. But I think if we look throughout history as we've had new technological advancements and you can think, I don't know, the, the the Internet or the spreadsheet or whatever it might be, we do always adapt. And I think that's where the points that Scarlett made are really crucial around making sure people have the right skills, that people have the access to these technologies to adopt and use them so that we are making sure that the people are ready for the change. But also through that, we're making sure that the time that we're freeing up is being used for those high value tasks.
Fantastic response. Kate That was excellent. Scarlett Did you have any Quince to add to that? Yeah, I will add to that. You know, I'm really excited about some of the innovative products that we've seen come out of Australian innovation using. At least one example I'd love to highlight is in the medical industry, actually, it's a fantastic company called Harrison Air that is based in Sydney.
It's one of Australia's leading companies actually, and the technology they've developed augments the work of medical professionals detecting cancer. So that's helping to provide, you know, another set of eyes on a really complex situation where it can be really difficult to make those determinations. And it's allowing us to really you know, we've been in a phase of humanity where we've been just collecting all the data. We click on so much information and even early versions of, you know, the amount of data that had gone into those models would take a human being.
More than 2000 years to read. So this is really a timely development for us because it's allowing us to unlock, you know, this horde of data that we've, you know, collectively gathered over the years since the Internet became available to us. So I'm excited to see the positive impacts of that augmentation, but also that the other things that it will allow us to do, you know, democratize the use of many different kind of digital technologies that, you know, in the past you might have needed to go and do a degree to understand how to, you know, develop software that now you've got a copilot that's helping you to write really good quality software.
We've got interesting applications of air in cybersecurity, particularly, which is another really high volume data environment that's really going to have a positive impact on the way that our society can can manage the risks that come with cyber security incidents. Yeah, that's that's great. Scarlett. I know that. P.W. See, do an annual CEO survey. And for many years, it was revealing that that CEOs were frustrated because they were collecting and storing huge amounts of data. But it's actually how do you use that data to create value for their customers and employees and shareholders? So I think that data synthesis is is super interesting.
There are a number of questions that I think and I just about job loss and I think that seemed to me to be a strong thread. You see across all of these conversations is to what extent why might we see job loss at at an alarming rate and to how do we make sure that people are going to be supported into new employment, into these new roles? I think we touched on the Skilling piece, but do you see that that's that's obviously an area that we must focus on going forward. Yeah, I'm happy to take that one. But I think we do need to be really responsible in the way that we support people. And this is actually an area where Australia has a fantastic advantage. You know, we are a country of, you know, in terms of global proportions, quite a small population with less than 30 million and we've got a very high GDP per person and we've got a very strong education system.
And I think we have the opportunity to make sure that that is supporting lifelong learning, particularly for roles that will be impacted by automation and augmentation, which as we've seen, is the vast majority of roles in our economy. So there's kind of two threads there. The first is focusing innovation on areas where we already know we have a social edge and quite rightly called out.
Teaching is a great example that we simply do not have enough teachers to provide the service that we need to to the young people of Australia. So that is an area for innovation. So instead of trying to, to fight against the flow of getting people in to become teachers, let's help the teachers that we have to their time.
And the second, of course, is that reskilling component. And we're saying a lot of organizations do it really well. Datacom springs to mind, they've got a great program reskilling call center workers into tech jobs, highly skilled tech jobs. But the tool itself actually helps us to do that with Generative II, which is fantastic. So it's more about how do we understand our customers needs and how do we understand our business. So if we can be unlocking those people in our business, we have fantastic corporate knowledge but perhaps don't have high technology skills.
Now we can actually use technology to bridge that gap much more quickly. Fantastic. I, I think that piece around lifelong learning is, is the lesson really for us. So I'm often inspired by what Singapore does in this space and it's that appreciation that really people are our greatest asset and that we need to kind of move towards this lifelong learning ambition as much as we possibly can.
And there is a great question, scholar, I might ask you to to respond to this one. But to what extent can we, as an industry and as an auto industry, make sure that AI generates benefits and impact for everyone in society and isn't used as a tool to concentrate wealth and exacerbate inequality. Now, that is a particularly cruel question to ask you, scholar, as I don't know how many how many coffees you've had today. And certainly that that essentially is a global question. But I'd love to know, you know, we talk about economic opportunity. How do we make sure that A.I.
is a tool to help benefit everyone? This is a question that is really close to my heart, and inclusivity is such an important piece for me. If I can indulge in just a little bit of personal background. I actually was a software developer by trade when I left university and my husband is in the military and we moved around the country a lot. And what I saw is that I was a software developer and I could just take my job to wherever we went and just work. Right. And many, many of my peers ran into a big brick wall in their career when we were posted into tiny, tiny towns. And that really made me passionate about making sure that there was really equitable access to technology, education.
But also how can we use technology to make sure that everyone can prosper and sort of have access to opportunities that are flexible, that are able to be done from the place that you up in. And that also allows us to unlock the benefit of diverse thinking that comes from including people in creating technology products who might not otherwise have that opportunity. So that again is something that Australia can be a leader in. But it's a really important point that, you know, often we're having this conversation about technology, but it's not actually about a technology question, it's about a social question. So as a society, how can we be really clear that this is what we value about equality and we value access to economic opportunity for all of the members of our society.
And it's really important that we have that conversation in contexts like this and that it's happening in all of the businesses that are developing these tools. And just to kind of bring that back to the practical, what can we do as an industry? We can take ethical frameworks really seriously when we're developing our tools. And also when you're thinking about, you know, the inputs to the tools, outputs from the tools where all these different things coming from and going and how are we considering the economic impacts that we are making in those areas and bringing people along for the journey in terms of developing these tools and being able to access and use them and access the economic benefit on the other end.
Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things I get to be exposed to here at the National Center is this so many of the emerging use cases we see coming from the AI, the use of AI to solve challenges. And whilst employment is a part of this, I think there's a broad opportunity for us to channel AI into solving some of our most complex challenges, which of course will benefit the rest of the country. And I was reading last night actually about how A.I. is being used to monitor equality for the early signs of bushfires.
And as a person that sort of lives on the cusp of the Adelaide Hills AI, that was music to my ears. Kate, you mentioned earlier some of the medical use cases that you're seeing. I know that Microsoft also has an incredible involvement in seeing AI and some of those more human stories as well.
Do you have any other examples where you might want to talk about the more human side? It may not be economic, but it's it's going to benefit all of us. I think. Yeah, I think one of the amazing use cases we're seeing for generative AI technologies and Scarlett alluded to it before just for the ability to quickly crunch just enormous swathes of data is in environmental management, sustainability and disaster response. I'd refer those who are joining us to the call to Microsoft's AI for good work, a lot of which focuses on these deep problems that we now have these fantastic tools to solve or to start to mitigate.
So, you know, some examples there are the work that we're doing with the Pacific community in the Pacific around tracking environmental impacts of climate change. I feel good is also doing a lot in disaster response so that you can track what areas are going to be more vulnerable to a particular disaster. So you can have a really rapid response should there be a flood or a fire or a heat wave.
So I think that if we zoom out to these big, huge problems, there are just endless examples of where we're going to be able to really have some incredible solutions that it just wasn't possible before these technologies were available. In addition to those like the Drudge Work pedestrian task that the report highlights, that we will see, you know, the task based benefits that individually we're going to find as well. Speaking of Drudge work, I think I'm going to lose my role as slide manager following event.
So I'm looking forward to offloading that to to I. We've got a really great question and I think this is perhaps where we we finish off today. Again, you know, this II journey is not a nice to have. It's it's mandatory really for every organization and really every person working in in Australia at the moment.
But for a business that is really at the start of their journey, do you have some advice about what they can do this year to get started and perhaps we'll go to you? Scarlett Absolutely. So the first one is look at the tools that you already have in your business. In terms of digital tools, you might find that many of the providers that you have, you know, for your CRM and for some of your back office systems are already offering some generated by tools that you might need to upgrade your software.
You may need to get some additional plug ins, but you might be able to put that adding, you know, more and more vendors to your business or without adding a great deal of complexity, you may be able to benefit from some of those things really quickly. So I have a look into that first. And secondly, and this is not probably a fun answer, but you've got to do the boring bit, you've got to do the process mapping and you've got to really sit down with your staff listen to them understand what is what's the boring part of the job. You know, what's taking up a lot of their time.
So seek out those friction points that will give you the most sort of high impact use cases to action first. And I think you'll find once you've sort of gone through the process with one tool or one kind of process that you're going to look at applying, generally they are to you'll just start seeing them pop up all around you when it's on your mind. So at different times of applications. So yeah, to recap, look at what you already have.
How can that be extended and then do the the boring foundational work of risk management and your other business process pieces and go from there. Now, Scarlett, I've got to pick you up on that. It's not boring, it's exciting.
And the National Center can also help with some of these tools and templates that you might use to better manage those risk aspects. Kate Do you have some practical things that you can recommend businesses get started with? Yeah, I think as we think about the New Year, once you've got access particularly to the CO piloting tools, there's a lot of changes to habits that you need to make to maximize the value of these tools. So there's a little bit of tweaking and experimenting in your own practices. Microsoft's just released a great article that the No. The Five The Five Habits that you can start to think about as you bring generative AI into your daily workflow.
So we'll share a link to that and people can have a little read. It's a pretty fun article to start the New Year with. Excellent. That's that's great. I know that very, very soon the National Center will be produced in sharing a free resource that will be helping organizations understand how they begin this journey.
Again, we are particularly keen to support small and medium sized businesses with this journey, and so the guide has been really written for those people in mind. You, where do you start? How do you start to kind of dip between and then dick your fortune? Then soon enough you'll be you'll be swimming away in that great tide. And it's, you know, I guess it's not it's not a spectator sport any of this. You know, you need to actually get better at it by using it and by understanding the opportunity to in the implications.
And that's why we exist. So I want to wrap up and thank you both very, very much, Kate and Scarlett, for those excellent contributions. The report is freely available on the Tech Council website. There's also a summary in the Microsoft website.
We've provided some additional resources that you might look at to provide a greater level of detail than what we were able to provide today. We also have a heap of resources on the National II Center website. We'd also invite you to follow us on LinkedIn. We would love you to be part of our responsible AI network, and please join the conversation on your social media channels of choice. We would be very grateful if you provide us with some feedback on today's session and think about subscribing to our newsletter so that you don't miss some of these updates that we have available for you this year. Thank you very much.
Again, thank you to the i.t. Team and to my colleagues rochelle and rita for supporting the event today. Thank you and have a great day.
2024-02-20 06:45
