The managing partner of AI advisory firm Meliora, Clive Dickens, says that the advertising, marketing and media industries will become dependent on overseas technology if Australia’s doesn’t build its own sovereign AI model, which will ultimately prevent the “the sameness crisis” and “beige answers”.
Dickens, who has previously worked in senior digital and c-suite roles at Optus, Seven West Media, Southern Cross Austereo and Yahoo7, believes an Australian-built frontier AI model, trained on licensed, consented and paid-for local content, would give marketers greater legal certainty, keep sensitive customer data under Australian control, unlock new revenue streams for publishers and creators, and preserve the country’s unique creative voice.
His comments build on a blog he published earlier this week following Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s AI speech at the University of Sydney.
Yesterday B&T spoke with Australia’s advertising industry, who welcomed the AI agenda, but warned that regulation alone would not secure Australia’s creative future.
While also praising the government’s plans for an Office of AI, national AI standards and stronger copyright protections, Dickens has argued Australia had “written the rules for a game we don’t yet play”.
“What there isn’t is a commitment to build a single sovereign Australian AI model. No compute strategy. No capital. No national champion,” he wrote. “The word sovereignty appears throughout, but sovereignty built on someone else’s models is a subscription.”
Dickens also warned Australia’s dependence on overseas AI providers leaves businesses exposed when access to frontier models is determined by foreign governments. “When your most important productivity technology can be revoked by another government’s export policy, you are not sovereign. You are a tenant with a nice view,” he wrote.
Instead, he urged the government to invest in domestic AI compute infrastructure and support the development of a sovereign Australian AI model trained entirely on licensed local creative works, arguing it could become a global point of difference for Australian businesses.
B&T caught up with Dickens, who is currently in London, to find out why he believes sovereign AI could reshape Australia’s advertising and marketing industry, and what it would mean for agencies, brands, publishers and creators.
B&T: How would Australia’s advertising and marketing industry benefit if we built our own sovereign AI?
Clive Dickens: Three ways, and they’re not related to being patriotic.
First, legal certainty. Every marketer using a global frontier model today is building campaigns on training data with an asterisk over it. The lawsuits are real and they’re multiplying. A sovereign model trained on licensed, consented, paid-for content removes that asterisk. Your legal team stops being the slowest person in the room.
Second, data residency. Brands are pushing first-party customer data into models governed by another country’s export policy. We’ve watched access get switched off from Washington twice this year. A sovereign model could mean your march stack can’t be taken hostage by someone else’s politics.
Third, the money stays here. Right now, almost every AI dollar the industry spends is a leased capability. Build it here and that spend becomes local jobs, local talent, and local IP.
B&T: What could an Australian-built AI model offer marketers that global models can’t?
CD: Cultural fluency, for a start. The global models speak a kind of mid-Atlantic beige. They don’t really get Australian humour, our vernacular, our irreverence, the things that make an Australian campaign hit. A model trained on licensed Australian journalism, literature, music, and advertising archives would understand this country the way a great Australian creative does.
And provenance. This is the one nobody else on earth can offer yet. Every major model carries the original sin of scraped data. An Australian model could be clean by design. Fair trained, fair governed, fair powered. That’s not a compliance footnote. That’s a product nobody else has.
B&T: Could sovereign AI become a competitive advantage for Australian brands, or is this more about national security?
CD: It’s both, and they’re the same coin. The security argument gets it funded. The brand argument gets it used.
Here’s the advantage: in a world drowning in AI slop, provenance becomes the premium. “Trained fairly in Australia” could do for AI-assisted work what “Made in Australia” does for everything else we’re proud of. Imagine telling your customers that no artist was ripped off in the making of your campaign and meaning it.
That’s a claim no brand using a scraped model can make.
B&T: Would agencies and marketers choose an Australian AI model over platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini? Why?
CD: Not out of loyalty. Nobody buys the second-best tool because it has a flag on it, and nor should they.
But it doesn’t need to beat the frontier models at everything. It needs to win where it matters: cultural fluency, legal indemnity, data sovereignty. That’s exactly how Cohere is growing in Canada. It didn’t out-muscle OpenAI globally. It won RBC and Bell because it answered questions the giants couldn’t. Agencies are already multi-model.
The question isn’t ChatGPT or the Australian model. It’s which jobs go where. The brief that touches customer data, brand risk or Australian culture goes to the sovereign one.
B&T: Could sovereign AI unlock new revenue streams for publishers and creators if content is licensed rather than scraped?
CD: This is the biggest prize in the whole debate, and the one Albo’s speech got closest to. He said unlicensed training is theft. We agree. But the flip side of theft is a market.
A licensing regime attached to a sovereign model turns every archive in the country into a recurring revenue asset. Decades of journalism, photography, music, scripts, and campaigns, currently sitting as cost centres, become training assets that pay at the source, every time.
For publishers who watched search and social strip-mine their businesses for twenty years, this is the do-over. The last technology wave took their content and gave back traffic. This one can take their content and give back rent.
B&T: How might this change the way brands create campaigns?
CD: The boring parts get faster and the human parts get more human. That’s the whole game.
We invest in this thesis every day. Aussie AI startups like Springboards.AI don’t generate campaigns, they springboard creatives to better ideas faster. A sovereign model does the same at national scale: research, versioning, localisation and compliance compressed from weeks to hours, with provenance built in, so the recovered time goes back into the thing AI cannot do, which is the insight, the craft and the humanity that make people feel something.
The sameness crisis in advertising is a thing. Everyone prompting the same three global models gets the same beige answers. A model that understands this country, trained fairly on the best work this country has produced, is how Australian creativity stays unmistakably Australian.
