Aussie AI Industry Badly Needs a Talent Strategy
- By CDOTrends editors
- February 28, 2023
AI has been rapidly transforming the world and is rapidly becoming an essential part of many industries. Australia stands to benefit greatly from this technology, but failure to act now could mean that Australia is left behind and will lose control of this technology to foreign commercial and national interests.
This is the belief of 14 leading university professors in the field of AI from eight universities who have formed the Kingston AI Group. The group has emphasized that Australia must develop a national AI strategy and significantly increase its funding for domestic AI capability if it wants to become a world leader in the field by 2030.
They also called for an integrated national strategy to grow the domestic education-to-industry AI talent pipeline and use AI as a productivity enhancer to support economic growth and the creation of higher-paying jobs. For them, the university sector should play a major role in this by producing “a critical mass of AI experts” to drive the growth of advanced technology industries.
“A failure to deliver the AI workforce Australia needs will harm our future economic growth, shrink our economic complexity, and weaken our sovereign control in key industry sectors,” a recent statement said.
The professors noted that Australia is already behind other countries in AI capability, with the CSIRO estimating that approximately 161,000 new specialist AI workers are needed by 2030 to bridge this gap.
Their full statement acknowledges that Australia is performing well in some key areas of AI innovation but lagging behind other countries that have invested more proactively. According to them, Australia is "not operating at the scale required to support the needs of current industries, let alone new ones."
Professor Simon Lucey of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning at the University of Adelaide said that businesses and governments must build their own AI capabilities and not rely solely on purchasing products from international suppliers.
He referenced the example of Uber, which disrupted the taxi industry and took all the profits overseas. Professor Lucey warned that Australian industries are at risk of a similar disruption if they do not develop their own AI capabilities, also citing the recent enthusiasm for AI technologies such as ChatGPT.
The Kingston AI Group first met in late September 2022 and since then has been advocating for a national AI strategy. The group believes that the development of sovereign AI is important for Australia’s security and prosperity.
Image credit: iStockphoto/eenevski