Mark Sheppard

Energised after an insightful and empowering Abundium Sisterhood session with Dr Kellie Nuttall, National Lead Partner, AI Institute, Deloitte yesterday on the state of AI in Australia and what it means for C-Suite leaders! Sharing some reflections: • AI is not just a technology play, it’s a business strategy play. The CEO is the most important driver of adoption and impact. • AI fluency at the top matters, boards and executives must balance ethics, innovation and organisational redesign while keeping human connection at the centre. • The opportunity is bigger than productivity. It’s about reimagining business models, customer relationships and even what a business is. • Loved one of Kellie's practical tips: create your own GPT-powered virtual advisory board of thinkers you admire, a sparring partner in your pocket! The challenge: moving from pilots to scale, from disconnected use cases to true transformation, and from productivity to imagination. The question I left with: Are we ready, as leaders, organisations and a nation to not just adopt AI, but to shape the market before it shapes us? Thank you Kellie for such a rich and future-stretching conversation 🙏 Would love to hear from the LinkedIn community, how are you and your organisation approaching AI right now: as a productivity tool, a growth driver, or a way to reimagine the business? #Abundium #Sisterhood #Leadership #AI #FutureofWork #CourageousLeadership

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Federal Roundtable Risks Missing the $116 Billion AI Prize The Australian Treasurer’s Economic Reform Roundtable begins today, and it’s already overlooking the single biggest lever for productivity this century: Artificial Intelligence. From the steam engine to the internet, every major leap in productivity has been driven by technology. AI is the next, and perhaps the most transformative, step. The Productivity Commission estimates Australia could gain $116 billion if we accelerate AI adoption. Yet when Treasurer Jim Chalmers gathers a star-studded guest list in Canberra, few in the room will have the expertise to speak with authority on the AI challenge. This is not a minor omission. And I will find it particularly ironic if the 900 submissions have been summarised by Generative AI, instead of having a credible resource in the room. Australia’s problem is not that we lack access to AI tools, it’s that we don’t trust them. Not as individuals, not as consumers, and certainly not in the C-suite. The evidence is stark. A recent KPMG and University of Melbourne study of 48,000 people across 47 countries found Australia ranked dead last in believing AI’s benefits outweigh its risks - just 30 per cent of Australians agreed. Without trust, adoption (and productivity) will stall. Trust rests on two pillars: transparency and data sovereignty. Transparency means knowing what data an AI model was trained on, how it was obtained, and what biases are embedded. That’s not information we will get from a US mega-tech provider - not now, not ever. Data sovereignty means ensuring Australian data stays under Australian control, from storage to processing. Many “onshore” AI services quietly send your information offshore for processing on GPUs located in the US, Brazil or beyond. Most Australians have no idea this is happening. If we want teachers, doctors, lawyers - anyone in critical roles - to embrace AI, they must know the systems they use are trained on Australian-relevant data and their inputs never leave our jurisdiction. This is achievable through sovereign models and federated learning, where data is used for training without ever leaving the state in which it resides. Tesla chair Robyn Denholm is right to warn that we are still in “inning zero” of the AI game and that if we only adopt AI, we might see a $115 billion benefit, but if we build and own the technology, the returns could be ten times greater. That future won’t happen without urgent action now. Yet none of this will reach the Treasurer’s ears if the right voices aren’t in the room. By ignoring AI trust, the roundtable risks squandering the $116 billion productivity prize. If we fail to act now, Australia will fall further behind and no amount of post-summit spin will disguise that failure.

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