Australia’s National AI Plan is now firmly directed towards acceleration: attracting investment, scaling infrastructure, and capturing productivity gains.

For business leaders, this matters. Not because the plan tells organisations how to deploy AI—it largely doesn’t—but because it reshapes the environment in which leadership decisions about AI will be made.

The plan rests on three pillars:

And the plan assumes that leadership capability, culture, and decision-making will naturally keep pace with rapid technological adoption.

History shows that this kind of assumption is unfounded.

Australia has joined a global race. Like the United States and unlike the European Union, the government has chosen not to introduce mandatory guardrails for high-risk AI systems, instead relying on existing legal frameworks and targeted, incremental reform

For business leaders, this shifts responsibility decisively inwards.

In the absence of prescriptive regulation, organisations will carry greater accountability for:

This is not a compliance challenge. It is a leadership one.

The plan leans heavily on productivity: AI as a driver of efficiency, growth, and competitiveness.

Yet evidence shows that productivity gains, when new technology arrives, are substantially reduced without parallel investment in people, governance, and trust. Employees are not resistant to technology per se. They are resistant to exclusion:

The plan frames this disruption as a skills challenge—retraining and reskilling workers for an “AI-ready” future. That is of course necessary, but insufficient.

To accelerate successful adoption, leaders must also be able to:

This is precisely where leadership capability is being tested.

The government. in at least the short term, has opted for flexibility on legal revision to cope with AI, betting that existing law can adapt over time.

In practice, this means organisations will often be operating in an environment where legal clarity is absent.

Executives will need to make judgement calls on:

These are not technical decisions. They are ethical, cultural, and organisational ones —and they cannot be delegated to IT teams or vendors.

The National AI Plan implicitly elevates the role of leaders.

It assumes they can absorb complexity, manage uncertainty, and balance competing obligations to shareholders, workers, customers, and the community. But in reality, there is a growing gap between leaders’ technical exposure to AI, and their readiness to lead people through AI-driven change.

Leaders need to be empowered with the skills to role model and drive curiosity and active listening; engage in inclusive decision making under uncertainty; manage resilience and ambiguity  and not always expect perfect solutions; and build psychological safety for people to question the ethical and social implications of AI-generated decisions and solutions offered to financially and strategically complex issues which could affect branding and reputation.

The success of Australia’s AI Plan will be measured by whether leaders can:

AI may be moving fast. Leadership must move deliberately.