From Digital to Resilient: Australian Government Services in an AI-Accelerated World

AI reshaped both how Australian governments deliver services and how adversaries attack them. APS agencies, state governments, and the broader ANZ public sector were under simultaneous pressure to lift productivity, harden cyber posture, and do more with less.

Anthropic's Claude Mythos surfaced thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in weeks, with under 1% patched at the time. AI-driven discovery was already flooding agency vulnerability queues at a volume no human team could manually triage. Meanwhile, 95% of public sector AI pilots remained stuck in experimentation, leaving a gap between AI promise and the operational impact citizens felt.

In this session, we explored:

• Moving from AI experimentation to scalable, measurable operational impact
• A unified, AI-driven operating model across security, operations, and development
• Strengthening Essential Eight maturity when attackers could weaponise CVEs at machine speed
• Embedding compliance into continuous, automated remediation
• Reducing cognitive load on platform teams so they could focus on citizen outcomes

We explored how the Australian government could use AI for both productivity and protection, and build services designed to adapt, recover, and remain trusted.