Australia’s innovation capability is visible and counted. What is harder to see are the arrangements that allow a place to put that capability to use. This Insight introduces Hidden in Plain Sight, released 22 October 2026, and opens a series that follows the book’s argument Part by Part.

AI becomes productive when firms complement it with skills, quality data, management capability and supporting institutions. Turning AI into Productivity draws on a case base of 110 place-based innovation ecosystems and four weeks of site visits to show where Australia is strong, where the gaps are, what seven recommendations could do to capture the opportunities, and how they could be implemented. A UTS research project funded by the Google Foundation. Available from the Ama

Electricity took forty years to remake manufacturing, and the delay lay outside the technology: in factories, management and the institutions of trust. Industrial AI is on the same path. The Hugging Face intrusion exposed a missing complement in security assurance, and the 2008 financial crisis shows how systemic trust withdraws all at once when assurance fails. Board caution is rational; the task for policy is to build the assurance institutions early, before trust fails rat

General-purpose AI is a name that captures raw capabilities: models, compute, and data centres. Industrial AI names that capability once an economy has built the complements around it through redesigned work, new skills, better data and supporting institutions. This working paper explains why productivity gains have been slow to appear, examines Australia's data centre investment debate, and sets out what the Commonwealth, the states and businesses can do to turn AI capabilit