Australia is well-positioned to take advantage of the global boom in artificial intelligence but governments and regulators need to get the policy settings right so they don't stifle start-ups.
That's the message from two of the country's biggest entrepreneurs in the AI space, including the head of an infrastructure company that operates a network of energy-efficient data centres, which power the technology.
"This is unquestionably the significant industrial transformation in modern history," the head of stock exchange listed NextDC, Craig Scroggie, told a conference in Sydney on Tuesday.
Mr Scroggie echoed comments made earlier in the day by OpenAI founder and chief executive Sam Altman about Australia potentially sitting in a sweet spot in AI development.
Both noted the nation's stable security and political environment, clear regulatory regimes, and natural energy resources, which could underpin its future as a global leader,
While the AI sector is still in the relatively early stages, it's attracting trillions of dollars in investment a year globally - a pool that Australia needs to tap into.
McKinsey Partner Angus Dawson pointed to the US, which takes a light touch to regulation, relying on voluntary commitments from tech companies and sector-led laws, to encourage rapid innovation.
"There is actually a logic to it because there's no way you can regulate fast enough to actually understand what's going on and think through the implications," he told the Commonwealth Bank of Australia-hosted AI conference.
"We've got to work out where we want to be on that spectrum as a country, because otherwise what's going to happen is we're going to find out that we're actually sort of holding everything back."
Square Peg Co-founder Paul Bassat, who also co-founded the Seek jobs site in 1997, said Australia had some great homegrown tech companies, including Canva, Afterpay and Airwallex.
"We are strongest at the application layer (applying technology), we are typically less strong on the frontier (or development of) technology, historically," he said.
Mr Bassat said Australia needed many more new technology businesses to get the uplift they need to compete globally.
"We're going to need a massive cohort of new companies," he said, adding that he didn't want to get into a debate about the merits of this month's federal budget, which has been criticised for not offering enough support to start-ups.
"We need to have every single lever in place to ensure that we're producing a huge cohort of small- to medium-sized businesses.
"Start-ups, new companies that are going to produce the jobs that are going to be the future of the country.
"That is the mission one for any policy maker - for anyone who really cares about what sort of economy, what sort of society we're going to have over the next 20 years."
