The Guidance for AI Adoption, published by the National AI Centre on 21 October 2025, replaces the 2024 Voluntary AI Safety Standard and condenses its ten guardrails into six practices: decide who is accountable, understand impacts and plan accordingly, measure and manage risks, share essential information, test and monitor, and maintain human control.
- The Guidance for AI Adoption was published on 21 October 2025 and sets out six essential practices.Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Guidance for AI Adoption (21 Oct 2025)
- It streamlines the Voluntary AI Safety Standard's ten guardrails into six practices.Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Guidance for AI Adoption (21 Oct 2025)
- The National AI Plan was released on 2 December 2025.Australian Government, National AI Plan (2 Dec 2025)
- Under the plan, every Australian Government agency nominates a Chief AI Officer.ACS, Australia's new National AI Plan: top 9 highlights
Where it fits
Australia has taken a guidance-first approach to AI. The National AI Centre's Guidance for AI Adoption, published in October 2025, is the main framework for organisations, with a Foundations version for those starting out and an Implementation Practices version for governance and technical teams. The National AI Plan followed in December 2025.
The six practices
Decide who is accountable. Understand impacts and plan accordingly. Measure and manage risks. Share essential information. Test and monitor. Maintain human control. Each comes with templates, such as an AI register and policy templates.
Turning practices into systems
Most organisations can write a policy. The hard part is making it true inside the systems where AI runs. Accountability needs named owners per agent. Human control needs approvals and takeover. Testing and monitoring need logs. Sharing information needs a record of what AI did.
How Inova helps
Our Sydney team maps your AI use against the six practices, designs the governance model, and configures it in BLDR so approvals, human takeover and audit are part of the platform, not a separate document.
Questions people also ask
Is the guidance mandatory?
What happened to the Voluntary AI Safety Standard?
Does it apply to government agencies?
Ask us the hard questions. We publish the answers.
Where models run, who processes your data, how you exit, what it costs. Our answers are on the Trust page and in the security pack, and our work is on the record.
