When Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht fed ChatGPT a deliberately absurd challenge—design the logistics for a global camel delivery service—the AI didn't blink. It produced a complete operational plan, routing, turnaround times and all. That moment crystallized something for Obrecht: either his company would disrupt itself with AI, or it would be disrupted.
The realisation is no longer abstract. At CommBank's Accelerate AI event in Sydney this week, 800 Australian business leaders gathered to confront an uncomfortable fact. European companies are adopting AI at twice the rate of Australian ones. American companies are doing it at three times the rate. This is not a minor competitive lag—it is a structural threat. Paul Bassat, founder of Seek and a veteran tech investor, was blunt: "If you don't adopt AI, almost certainly you will lose market share. And ultimately, you will go out of business."
Yet Australia sits on genuine advantages. The country possesses abundant renewable energy, a skilled workforce and a stable regulatory environment. As grid-scale batteries and solar panels drive down electricity costs, Australia has become an attractive location for the massive data centres that will power an AI-driven economy. The top four tech hyperscalers—the US giants building the large language models behind generative AI—have already spent more than $700 billion on data centre and digital infrastructure this year alone. By 2026, that figure is expected to exceed $1 trillion globally. For Australia, the infrastructure investment alone could generate 100,000 jobs in the build phase, according to McKinsey senior partner Angus Dawson.
But there is a paradox. Despite these staggering investment flows, AI's actual impact on daily life so far has been minimal. Bassat puts it starkly: "If the ultimate measure is impact, we are less than one per cent of the way in." This gap between hype and lived experience may explain why it does not feel, yet, like we are living through the fourth industrial revolution—which is what Craig Scroggie, CEO of data centre operator NEXTDC, calls the current moment: "the production of intelligence."
The first visible cracks in this invisibility are appearing in unexpected places. Bunnings, the hardware retailer, launched Buddy, an AI shopping assistant, earlier this year. Last week alone, 25,000 customers used it to solve DIY problems, from painting advice to kitchen renovations. The company also deployed a staff chatbot across its 400 stores to 50,000 employees. It has already answered more than four million questions, saving each staff member roughly five minutes per day. Bunnings' chief customer officer Rachel McVitty noted that employees were already using personal ChatGPT tools on the shop floor—the appetite existed. The company simply moved to structure it.
The real economic upheaval may lie elsewhere. Bassat sketches an emerging model: a single person, perhaps recently laid off, starts a business running as many as a thousand AI agents doing work that previously required an entire team. It has never been cheaper or easier to start. The question facing Australia is whether it can move fast enough to capture not just the infrastructure opportunity, but the innovation opportunity that follows. The window is open, but it will not stay that way forever.