Budget 2023: $101 million to help Australian businesses adopt AI and quantum tech

The Australian government is the latest entity to climb aboard the Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype train, and it wants you to join it! As the 2023 federal budget reveals, it wants to support businesses with AI adoption.

Last week the Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic, announced Australia’s first national quantum strategy. This makes up part of the $1 billion from Labor’s National Reconstruction Fund that has been set aside for critical technologies.

As it turns out, AI and quantum go hand-in-hand when it comes to the budget, with both industries only being mentioned together.

According to the budget papers, $101.2 million over five years will be used to support small businesses integrating quantum and AI technologies into their operations.

This will be instituted across a number of initiatives, including:

• Supporting the adoption of AI technologies by small and medium enterprises to improve business processes, as well as increase trade competitiveness. It’s currently unclear exactly how the Labor government will ‘support’ the adoption of AI by small and medium businesses in Australia.
• Expansion of the National AI centre, as well as its role in “supporting responsible AI usage through developing governance and industry capabilities
• Establishing a  Critical Technologies Challenge Program that supports projects using “critical technologies to solve significant national challenges.” This will initially focus on projects utilising quantum computing.
• Establishing an Australian Centre for Quantum Growth to support the commercialisation of Australia’s quantum industry.

While AI is certainly nothing new, it has exploded in popularity within the big tech space over the last six months.

This was largely due to the release of ChatGPT — a generative AI chatbot from Open AI that went viral within a week.

Since then it has seemed that most major players in the space rushed to release their own competitors, or ChatGPT integrations into existing products.

Google Bard and Microsoft Copilot have both gone into beta this year, with the latter releasing a dedicated cybersecurity-focused version on the same day it let go of employees who were reportedly working on cybersecurity projects.

Adobe and Canva also announced their own AI integrations within days of one another, with Slack following suit just last week with Slack GPT. 

To see SmartCompany‘s full budget coverage, click here.