Australia ranks last in the world for trust in AI — and the reason is not that we don't use it. It's that we use it without trusting, training in, or understanding it. That gap is the real story.
- Only 30% of Australians believe AI's benefits outweigh its risks — the lowest of any of the 47 countries studied.
- This is not a usage problem. Around half of Australians use AI regularly; trust is lagging use, not the other way round.
- The real gap is confidence and literacy: just 24% of Australians have had any AI training, against a 39% global average.
- For leaders, low national trust is not weather to wait out. It is the adoption environment you are leading inside.
Australia ranks last in the world for trust in AI, and the reason is not the one most leaders assume. It is not that Australians do not use the technology — half of us use it regularly. It is that we use it without trusting it, without training in it, and without believing the institutions around it are ready. Australia leads the world in scepticism and trails it in confidence. That gap is the real story, and it is sitting inside your organisation right now.
I get asked whether this is just Australian cynicism. It is not. It is a coherence problem — a country using a tool faster than it has made sense of it. And the same pattern plays out in every boardroom I sit in.
Does Australia really rank last in AI trust?
It does. In the 2025 University of Melbourne and KPMG global study of more than 48,000 people across 47 countries, only 30% of Australians said the benefits of AI outweigh its risks — the lowest ranking of any nation surveyed. Just 36% are willing to trust AI, while 78% are concerned about negative outcomes. We sit near the bottom globally on acceptance, excitement and optimism.
Read that again. Bottom of forty-seven. This is not a rounding error. It is a national posture.
Is it that Australians simply don't use AI?
No — and this is the part that matters for leaders. Around 50% of Australians use AI regularly and roughly two-thirds say their employer uses it. The technology is already inside the building. What is missing is the human readiness around it: only 24% of Australians have undertaken any AI training, against a 39% global average, and more than 60% report low AI knowledge. Trust is lagging use. People are operating tools they do not understand and have not been trained on, and then — sensibly — they do not trust the result.
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Book your Strategy SessionWhy does national trust matter to my organisation?
Because trust is the substrate adoption runs on. The Australian Responsible AI Index found that 78% of organisations believed they were using AI safely and responsibly — but only 29% actually were when measured against responsible-AI practices. That is a forty-nine-point gap between confidence and reality, and it is exactly the kind of dissonance that erodes trust further when something goes wrong.
The encouraging signal: readiness is climbing from a low base. Cisco's 2025 AI Readiness Index found 22% of Australian organisations are now fully ready to deploy AI, up sharply from just 4% the year before. The movement is real. But a fully-ready minority inside a low-trust majority is a leadership challenge, not a technology one.
Australia leads the world in AI scepticism and trails it in AI confidence. We are using the tool faster than we have made sense of it.
What do leaders actually do with this?
You stop treating trust as a communications problem and start treating it as an operating condition. Close your own confidence-to-reality gap first — be honest about how responsibly you are actually using AI, not how responsibly you believe you are. Then invest in literacy before you invest in the next tool, because an untrained team cannot trust what it cannot understand. Trust is not won with a policy. It is built by people who know what they are doing.
Low national trust is not weather to wait out. It is the climate you are leading inside. The organisations that win the next decade in this market will be the ones that build trust deliberately, from the inside, starting with the leader.
| Measure (Australia) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Believe AI's benefits outweigh the risks | 30% — lowest of 47 countries |
| Willing to trust AI | 36% |
| Have had any AI training | 24% (vs 39% global) |
| Organisations fully AI-ready | 22% (up from 4% in 2024) |
| Believe they use AI responsibly vs actually do | 78% vs 29% |
Frequently asked questions
Does Australia really rank last in AI trust?
Is the problem that Australians don't use AI?
How AI-ready are Australian organisations?
About the author
Thomas W. Green is a Technology Futurist and keynote speaker. He works with leadership teams navigating the AI transition — where the bottleneck is no longer the technology, but the human operating system itself.