Artificial Intelligence is no longer a distant ambition. It is reshaping how nations create value, attract investment, and compete. For Australia, this transformation carries one of the largest growth opportunities in a generation.
The Australia’s AI Opportunities Report 2025, funded by OpenAI and produced in partnership with leading industry bodies including the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Computer Society, COSBOA, the AIIA, and Women in Digital, finds that AI could add up to $142 billion annually to Australia’s GDP by 2030.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. The report outlines clear, data-backed pathways for capturing this value through accelerated adoption, sovereign capability building, and regional leadership.
“Australia has the opportunity to build AI by Australia, for Australia, and of Australia,” said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer. “Putting AI tools into the hands of more Australians and businesses will broaden economic opportunity, ensuring the productivity benefits are widely shared.”
AI is already adding an estimated $21 billion a year to Australia’s economy through productivity improvements. The report outlines how this figure could grow sevenfold by 2030 if the nation invests strategically in local capability.
These gains reflect both scale and inclusivity. The report estimates that women will experience 35 percent higher wage growth than men, due to their overrepresentation in care, education, and health sectors: all industries forecast to see some of the strongest productivity gains from AI.
AI adoption could also lift labour productivity by up to 8 percent in sectors such as healthcare and social assistance, where more than half of all roles currently face staffing shortages. This dual impact, closing workforce gaps while improving productivity, translates to an additional $14 billion in gross value added.
Small businesses stand out as a key beneficiary. The report projects that SMEs will achieve productivity growth 22 percent faster than larger firms between 2025 and 2030, thanks to AI’s accessibility and low capital requirements.
“This report highlights the scale of the opportunity AI presents for Australia,” the Business Council of Australia noted. “If we get this right, AI can boost productivity, grow wages, and make Australian businesses more competitive on the global stage.”
The message is clear: AI is not simply a technology wave: it is the next engine of national competitiveness.
The report also sounds a note of urgency. Capturing this economic upside depends on addressing Australia’s infrastructure bottlenecks, specifically, in compute capacity, power, and connectivity.
As the report emphasises, this is not a “nice-to-have” infrastructure buildout. It is the foundation upon which Australia’s digital economy will run.
The scale of investment required brings new challenges: power density, sustainability, and interconnection. AI workloads are compute and energy-intensive, consuming exponentially more power than traditional IT.
That means future competitiveness will hinge not only on how much compute Australia can build, but how efficiently and sustainably it can operate it. Clean energy, renewable power, and water-efficient cooling systems will all determine whether Australia’s AI industry can scale responsibly and meet both ESG and economic performance benchmarks.
While AI adoption is global, its implementation is inherently local. The Australia’s AI Opportunities Report underscores that sovereign infrastructure is central to the nation’s ability to capture long-term value.
Australia’s trusted regulatory environment, strong privacy laws, and Five Eyes alignment make it one of the safest jurisdictions globally for hosting sensitive AI workloads. These attributes are critical as organisations seek to maintain control over data, models, and intellectual property in a world of tightening AI governance.
For regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government, data residency and security are non-negotiable. Sovereign infrastructure ensures that AI workloads remain within Australian borders, subject to Australian law, and protected by local compliance standards such as the Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act and the Digital Transformation Agency’s hosting certification framework.
The report argues that sovereign AI capability is more than just compliance, it is a strategic economic differentiator.
“Australia’s trusted position as a Five Eyes nation, combined with our strong regulatory framework and geopolitical stability, gives us a unique advantage in building secure and sovereign AI infrastructure,” said Scroggie.
As the report’s steering committee notes, this trust profile gives Australia an opportunity to become a regional exporter of intelligence, providing compute power, AI education, and trusted AI services across the Asia-Pacific.
The most successful leaders will be those who act now to:
AI is not a single technology. It is a new layer of national infrastructure. Organisations that treat it as such will be the ones that gain first-mover advantage and long-term resilience.
As the report’s authors write, “Compute, connectivity, and clean energy are the defining resources of modern competitiveness.”
Beyond infrastructure and economics, the report highlights AI’s potential to generate social and workforce benefits.
Average wages are forecast to rise by 7 percent across the economy, with particularly strong growth in female-dominated professions. This narrowing of the gender pay gap represents one of AI’s most meaningful social dividends.
In parallel, the report predicts that AI will ease pressure on critical workforce shortages, particularly in the care and health sectors. By automating administrative tasks and augmenting decision-making, AI can free skilled workers to focus on high-value activities, improving both productivity and service quality.
However, these benefits depend on strong national investment in digital skills development. As the ACS observed, “To capture the opportunity, we must build world-class compute infrastructure and accelerate the development of advanced digital skills.”
For CIOs, this means taking a holistic view of readiness: infrastructure, workforce capability, and trust must advance together to deliver enduring value.
The findings of the Australia’s AI Opportunities Report mark a turning point for Australian industry and government alike. For technology leaders, the message is direct: AI readiness is now an infrastructure question, not a software one.
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