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Business IT

This Month

Questions remain about where AI is heading, and how it could work best.

Will AI start living up to the hype in 2026?

After all the hype and big spending, there has been a growing sense of unease that some of the promises aren’t being matched by reality.

Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer of OpenAI, speaking in South Korean in September. Seoul was the third Asian office opened by the company.

OpenAI in Australian blitz as it woos start-ups, corporates

The Silicon Valley giant behind ChatGPT will offer free services to major venture capital-backed tech companies as it attempts to steal a march on rivals.

November

RBA survey reveals ‘shallow’ AI adoption as businesses stop at ChatGPT

The central bank’s research also suggests Australia is well behind other advanced economies in introducing artificial intelligence into how people worked.

October

CEO Matt Comyn. CBA shifted its core banking system onto AWS data centres just two weeks before the outage in Virginia.

CBA escaped the AWS crash. But what if it happens again?

CBA was not affected by the AWS outage even though it became the first Australian bank to move to a single cloud provider two weeks earlier.

August

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and CBA CEO Matt Comyn want to use AI to reduce fraud.

OpenAI inks deal with Commonwealth Bank

OpenAI and CBA will work together on artificial intelligence-backed services around fraud detection, customers and employees.

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Quantium chief executive Adam Druissi.

Godfathers of Australian AI cash in as businesses play catch-up

Woolworths-owned Quantium has become sought after in boardrooms as executives and directors seek crash courses in how to ride the AI wave.

July

Canva made all staff down tools to spend a week learning AI

An intensive bootcamp is being used by businesses to help staff overwhelmed by the latest technology and the breakneck pace of change.

ChatGPT agent

‘Try the future’: New ChatGPT AI agents promise to do your jobs

Drawing on three pre-existing OpenAI products, ChatGPT Agent lets users ask AI to take control of multi-step and fairly complex tasks.

Publishers and other website owners are being given more options to lock the front door to AI crawler bots.

Publishers, website owners to block AI ‘crawlers’ that don’t pay

Websites will find it easier to lock out bots from AI companies like OpenAI and Google that are taking data to train their models without payment or permission.

June

Shannon Sedgwick, Partner in charge of cybersecurity practice at MinterEllison.

How to safeguard your business (and your reputation)

Organisations are aware of the existence of cyber threats, but ways to minimise the dangers to systems and individual careers are less well understood.

“This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term,” CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a memo.

Amazon CEO warns white-collar staff that their jobs are on the line

In a memo explaining all the ways the technology giant is using AI, Andy Jassy told workers how they can stay relevant as bots become capable of doing more.

BCA chief executive Bran Black said Australia needs a clear national AI policy.

Business Council says government must step up on big AI questions

Industry needs clear national AI goals, regulatory certainty and much faster approvals for new data centres, according to the peak industry group.

May

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.

Boards have a tougher choice to make from today if they get hacked

Ransom payments to cybercriminals will now have to be disclosed via a government portal, putting companies under extra pressure.

Slack use has been unreliable for millions of users on Tuesday.

Slack stutters as messaging platform fixes ‘issues’

Millions of users of the workplace messaging app have reported problems sending messages and using channels they share with colleagues.

Relevance AI co-founders Daniel Vassilev, Daniel Palmer and Jacky Koh have been ahead of the curve on agentic AI.

Australian AI start-up raises $37m after backing by US tech heavyweight

Relevance AI has raised a $37 million investment from some Silicon Valley giants to build AI agents that can autonomously perform tasks previously done by humans.

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April

Director-general of The Australian Signals Directorate Abigail Bradshaw has acknowledged he big challenges facing SMBs trying to be cyber secure.

Small and medium businesses must act big in cybersecurity fight

SMBs face the same frightening cybersecurity landscape as larger enterprises, but lack anything like the same financial muscle and expert staff to fight back.

CISO Lens director David Cullen says AI cyber protection software is still only of limited value in the fight against hackers.

How hackers are using AI to trick their way through cyber defences

The jury is still out on whether these new tools are more helpful to hackers or cybersecurity professionals. The tech has led to an era of deepfakes and suspicion.

Ramsay Health CEO Natalie Davis says digitisation and AI are a big part of the hospital operator’s plans.

Ramsay Healthcare chief says the age of AI care is coming

The CEO of Australia’s biggest private hospital operator has flagged greater AI adoption as a way to help improve services.

NextDC chief executive Craig Scroggie says reports of reduced investment in data centre capacity are not borne out it his company’s books.

Microsoft pull-back casts doubts on local data centre boom

The CEO of data centre operator NextDC hoses down suggestions the sector is in for a correction but analysts warn of ‘AI fatigue’ across businesses.

March

Oracle denies being breached by a hacker, but hundreds of Australian clients are on alert after being named.

Hacker claims Oracle breach, sending business and agencies scrambling

Australia’s biggest companies rushed to check their systems after a hacker claimed to have stolen important credentials via tech giant Oracle.

Original URL: https://www.afr.com/topic/business-it-5vk