This is Graham Lynch. Welcome to Comms Day Live. Um Today, we'll be talking with Rosemary Sinclair from the dot A U Domain administration and also uh two visiting senior vice presidents from Cradle Point. Um It's the American based unit of Erickson that specializes in wireless wa platforms.
First up, I wanted to play an excerpt of a speech that has absolutely nothing to do with telecommunications, but I thought it was particularly relevant to a lot of the subjects that we deal with here at Comms Day Live. Now, you may have heard of Matt Barry, he's the founder and CEO of freelancer dot com, one of the world's most successful dot com companies in that particular market vertical.
And he gave a speech this week to the Sydney morning, Herald's um summit uh dealing with the future of Sydney going out over the next 25 years. And uh the keynote wasn't very widely reported because it was, it was pretty out there, you know, he, he, he drew together all sorts of interesting strands of analysis um ranging from things such as the property bubble to the Australian banking system to an immigration um uh system that he feels is is uh badly damaged um through to skills misalignments,
through to bad planning laws and even complex award systems all framed around the notion of why is it so hard to get a restaurant meal in Sydney after nine PM?
But the book, the bit of the speech that I thought was interesting for S Day Live was when he, he, he talked about all the issues regarding um people who work in say, cafes and the difficulties they have in simply affording to live in Sydney and talked about the impact that artificial intelligence was gonna have on the labor force in the future. I thought he had some very, very interesting observations. Um and particularly in view of what he actually does and where he comes from.
Let's have a listen to what he had to say. Chat G BT had 100 million users in two months. The fastest in history. It currently scores the top 1% for verbal in the G R E for us grad school. The top 7% in the S A undergrad, top 10% uniform bar exam, top 12% in the L S A T and top 15% in advanced placement, statistics, art, history, psychology and biology. Every day, the A I sucks down more data and every day they're getting smarter where it fails for now is what we perceive as creativity.
It's hard to get chat C BT to crack a joke. That isn't a dad joke. But give it as we give up more data. We're seeing more intelligent behaviors that we don't understand and we didn't predict scientists are wondering if we're starting to see sparks of art, uh general, artificial general intelligence, creativity, heart and soul might just emerge.
The next biggest drop for migrants is being a GP and not that will be many soon with chat GP T the 8% of the population trying to wangle a Valium oxyCODONE will be happy to hear about that. A study comparing chat GP T to, to GPS or patients preferring their A I 79% of the time with responses four times longer, four times better quality and 10 times more empathetic motor, motor mechanics will follow with electric vehicles. We need less of and accountants.
I still feel sorry for accountants because together with only fans models A I is going to wipe them out. Half of white collar admin jobs will go and counting is rules based. There's no room for creativity or for being creative. The government doesn't like it. Half of lawyers are next. With the exception of deal making or Charles Water Street theatricals. Most of drafting, most of drafting and chat GP T can do it better instead of paying a lawyer a hun uh $1200 an hour and six minute increments.
Chat GP T can write an argument, a letter, the patents research, explain a case file. A suit or fight your parking ticket in seconds for free minter Ellison Australia's largest law firm panicked first, many of our clients are really have really been grappling with the question of whether billable hours is the best way to measure our value. As professional advisors.
The game is upwards of legal bills annotated with read, email, pull out template, edit, edit, edit, pretend this teleconference with partner reply to email are over frankly software and uh is even uh will be next and even more amenable to L M M. Si told my engineers there's a chance in the next 12 months, they won't be running code anymore, at least like not like now they'll move up the stack and be more like producers, product managers or directors mass layoffs are coming.
We're going to see the same social displacement and upheaval that the mechanization of agriculture caused in the 18th and 19th centuries and the mechanization of manufacturing caused in the 20th century only this time. It's with the intellectual classes, the first contributed to the long depression of the 18 seventies.
And that led to the Great depression of the 19 twenties, the higher paying the job, the more vulnerable it is I B M just announced it's gonna stop hiring and 8000 jobs in the next five years will be replaced by A I including 30% of all non customer facing roles. Education. Our fifth biggest export will be heavily impacted. Researchers have found that 19 or 30 jobs, most like the top 19 or 30 jobs most likely to be wiped out a post-secondary.
Teaching A I can already develop a curriculum better personalized for students, strengths, weaknesses and learning style. You can now chat to a textbook as if it was a professor. Check the textbook companies. So their stock for 48% when they amit A chat G BT was affecting their business. This might cause a problem maintaining Australia's scientific edge, giving, teaching cross funds research. But the bulk of immigration is not for that or for entrepreneurs that create jobs rather than take jobs.
It's designed for serving us copies and to keep a bubble alive. Yet it's almost impossible to get a meal in Sydney after night. So that's Matt Barry uh from freelancer dot com talking about the impact that artificial intelligence might have on the labor force and particularly interesting if you're in a telco where A I is definitely gonna have a profound effect sooner than later. Now, moving on now, I don't, I don't know about you.
I I started a business in Australia at about the same time as the internet started. And one of the things I always coveted was a domain name um on the highest level I E dot com. Um the dot com dot A U thing um I felt diminished. Uh My appeal as a company but I was wrong. A new survey has been conducted by the dot A U Domain Administration that shows that the far, far from a dot com by itself, domain conveying some kind of international status.
76% of people in Australia are more likely to trust a company that has the dot A U in it. It's, I guess it's perceived as um being sort of more locally trustworthy and accessible. So to find out about this survey, I spoke with Rosemary Sinclair, who's the CEO of the dot A U Domain Administration. Yeah. So the so the survey really um comes from the fact that we are really focused in our work on creating value for Australians around the internet.
It would be really easy for us to think of the task as being a technical task, running the domain name system or a rules compliance task. But we work very hard to make sure that we're focused on what all this means for Australians and what it means beneficially. So, trying to find out where Australians see and find value from dot AU is the core reason that we did it.
And we were highly delighted Graham to find out that Australians do understand that dot AU is a trusted signifier that by comparison with other ways of doing things dot AU is chosen by Australians because of that sense of trustworthiness and credibility and reliability um and chosen on both sides. That's what was really interesting uh chosen by people using domain names uh and checking websites and so on.
But also chosen by Australian businesses who know that Australian consumers um identify dot A U as a trustworthy uh uh signifier. Now, going even further, um the A U domain administration last year introduced what they call a direct domain. So you get rid of the dot com. It's just a direct dot A U. We actually spoke about this at the time um with rosemary when it was launched.
Now, they launched this and they had, they had an expectation that it might account for say 5% of registrations in the first year, but it zoomed right past that and, and got to 18% of registrations as of uh the end of March, which is um way, way, way over original projections. So I asked Marse Marie about that as well.
Well, um we think that we came into the market with an innovation that was just right on the money and of course, we were in the market uh around the time of the pandemic where we're using the internet um to degrees that they had never done before. And one of the little indicators we saw was about 200,000 Australian businesses that had never had a website suddenly found that they needed a domain name. So we were just right at the right time with an innovation around a new name space.
And what we've seen is great take up. In fact, you're absolutely right. We thought it would be about five per cent of the total name space. It's 18 per cent of the domain. So a very rapid take up reminded me of the take up of mobile phones by Australians. You know, once things got sorted out, that s curve just went roaring perpendicularly. And that's really what we feel has happened here. So it's the innovative choice that has really met the needs of Australians.
And it's backed up by such interesting and unexpected data source such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics because I'm always looking for confirmatory data about what's going on. And they've released a report about digital activity in Australia that shows that digital activity continues to grow in terms of contribution to the economy. But interestingly enough, we're creeping up the stack. So we're going from equipment uh to software to hardware up to applications.
And now the um main driver of value adding to the economy is e-commerce dash retail. So it's people using all of the elements of the communications and internet technologies to actually do things that they want to do and through that making a contribution to the economy. So it's, you know, it's just the the right um choice at the right time really. I think that's, that's the core of its success.
OK. Well, what's interesting about that is that for the last decade or so, I'm pretty sure that Australia has been tops in the world for domain registrations per capita. So the fact that a new um category can come out and achieve success so quickly, which presumably is only um added uh to that ranking um is, is pretty amazing stuff. Um And, and, and as indicated, there are a pretty good sign of how advanced we are as a digital economy. Now, moving on.
Uh finally, um Cradle Point, um they're the company uh out of Boise Idaho uh bought by Erickson a couple of years back, specialize in in wireless. Uh um which obviously is an emerging category and, and what's what's particularly interesting in their particular marker is the emergence of five G network slicing of.
Obviously, it's moving um a, a big focus of enterprise towards wireless and this plays straight into um the sweet spot for what Cradle Point does so that we, we had two visiting um senior vice presidents from Crater Point out in Australia uh last week. Um Lindsay not, well and Lisa guest, we, we had a long chat with them. I just wanted to excerpt a part of that, that chat.
First of all of Lindsay, talking about, I guess his contention that five G is slicing is actually a very good thing for Telcos because it might may allow them to get some of the value back that, that they perhaps lost. Um with the advent of about a decade ago. Let's, let's hear from what Lindsay had to say if I rewind the clock to say 2013, then um if uh if an enterprise wanted to, to order some sort of a secure managed circuit, they would call their Telstra Optus, whomever.
And they would do that because that was by and large, the big, you know, the, the only choice. And so along in 2014 came a lot of the S D players. And really, if you think about it, it was a disintermediation uh of the operators because now I could buy cheap broadband and, you know, use S T N and marry that together and so on and so forth.
So strategically, from an operator perspective, they lost a lot of market power uh at that point because, you know, they were no longer a monopoly of sorts if you will or an oligopoly. But um that became a bit of a, a challenge over time. Uh because even now, and I find this quite ironic is that when we talk to operators, they're pushing those same solutions, those same vendors who dis inter intermediate them, which, you know, a little bit of irony there.
But what we see in five G and in particular slicing and a number of other capabilities that will come along as part of five G, um It really provides the potential of giving that market power back to the operators. And you say, well, well, why, you know, S T UN players aren't gonna go away? You're right, they're not. But what has happened is especially in COVID.
But we've seen this evolution over the last say, you know, 78 years where businesses are being pressured, whether it's because of economics or, you know, a global pandemic to change how they do business. And a lot of their, um, their employees are getting closer to their customers and working from home and doing, uh, an office that's actually in their vehicle quite frankly. Uh, and they need the same kind of manageability, security and control that they do in any other office.
You know, we call that a branch of one or the mobile office. So what, and of course, you can't do that with a wire, you can't, you know, attach fiber to the vehicle. And so what we've done with slicing is we've, and in fact, in particular is we've recognized this, um our CEO calls it or says anything that can be wireless will be wireless. You know, if you think about the land, it's, it's really that way, there's really not a lot of difference in the wind.
I mean, it's not like fiber is going to disappear, but copper certainly is. And so as we see that what we're doing is providing a tool set to operators to be able to deliver those kinds of customer experiences in those new age environments and get a bit of that market power back. Ok. Now, um I, I also asked uh Lisa guest who was accompanying Lindsay on their trip to Australia, um what she saw in terms of the Australian marketplace and some of the customers they spoke to while they were out here.
I here's, I was surprised we found a lot of enterprise customers pushing the carriers to do more with very fascinating use cases such as content delivery to movie theaters. You know, let's get rid of the encrypted servers. And now I can very flexibly deliver content, you know, that they're giving carriers ideas of services they could offer. And that, that's, well, it's a small service. It's not a niche things like filming live action reality shows out in the middle of nowhere.
And you want to get your video either up to social media off to editing wherever, using wireless and even a mainstream customer that's very large retail, looking to go primary wireless uh, in, in their, you know, their stores and also looking to even do private networking in warehouses. Ok. Well, that's quite a point, Lisa guest and, er, Lindsay, not, well visiting from the United States and that's it for common day live this week. We'll be back soon. Take care.