Are we missing the boat? Our need for sovereign AI capability

[ Abstract ]

The Australi.ai co-founders on how agentic AI is commoditising the artisanal skills cyber careers were built on, and why Australia should build that capability domestically rather than rent it from foreign vendors.

Australian cybersecurity is entering its own industrial revolution, and most of the profession has its head in the sand. The skills that defined cyber careers, artisanal, tightly held and expensive, are being commoditised by agentic AI faster than anyone wants to admit. A skilled pen tester is still valuable, but a competent operator running a swarm of agents is a different category of capability altogether. The same compression is hitting assurance, SecOps and GRC. The work that used to require a specialist is increasingly a repeatable process.

This is not a distant projection. Open models have now crossed the threshold of reliability for long-horizon agentic tasks, which means the capability no longer depends on a large budget or a deep investment in tooling. That lowers the barrier to entry for everyone, including those who will use it to do harm, and it can be stood up for a fraction of what most businesses assume. The result is a K-shaped profession: a minority who harness the tooling accelerate away, while everyone else risks being left behind.

Cole Cornford and Ben Gittins, founders of Australi.ai, argue this future does not have to be so unevenly distributed. The large model companies are already making these decisions for us, releasing product after product designed to pull practitioners into their ecosystems. The same forces driving the disruption can instead be turned into cheap, open, domestic capability, so Australian businesses can conduct business the Australian way rather than renting their core competence from foreign vendors.

This talk covers what is actually happening across Australian cybersecurity, why it amounts to an identity crisis for the profession, and what practitioners and businesses can do about it. The focus is defensibility and economic viability, not the compute hype cycle that dominates most AI conversations. Attendees leave with a pragmatism-over-hype view of where the work is going, the data to back it up, and a concrete set of next steps for today, tomorrow and later.