Good morning.

G'day.

Today is about what things cost and who you let hold the keys. Amazon put a proper assistant into Australian homes, then priced the standalone version like a dare. Check whether you already pay for Prime before you pay anything for Alexa+.

In today’s briefing:

🤝NAB starts testing AI agents that act for customers

🔌Cloncurry needs the grid before data centre money arrives

🔊 Alexa+ lands here, free with Prime and $29.99 without

⚠️ A UK safety test caught AI agents attacking a real software project

🛡️CommBank sets AI bots on the scammers

🐮 Seen in the Wild: a breath test for cows

🛠️Tool Spotlight, and a prompt for long documents

Technology chief Patrick Wright said on 4 August the bank will start testing the security and operational guardrails of an agentic platform, with pilots over the coming year. The goal is agents that deal with bank staff and systems on a customer's behalf.

Why it matters for you: If your bank starts dealing with software agents, your suppliers and customers will too. Decide now what you would ever let an agent do with your accounts.

Source: Bloomberg

The north-west Queensland town has the land for AI infrastructure but no connection to the national electricity market, so local mines pay some of the dearest power in the world. Mayor Greg Campbell says two companies returned his calls last month. Treasurer David Janetzki pointed to a $200 million North West Energy Fund but gave no date for the western leg of CopperString.

Why it matters for you: Regional Queensland operators betting on cheap AI-era power should watch CopperString's timeline, not the announcements.

Source: ABC News

The Daily Rundown: Amazon switched on early access for Alexa+ here on 6 August, the generative-AI rebuild that has been running overseas since last year. Free for everyone during early access, which Amazon says ends 30 November. After that it comes with Prime at no extra cost, or AU$29.99 a month without. Prime is $9.99 a month.

Translated: "$29.99 a month" means "please buy Prime".

Practical takeaway: If you already own an Echo, register at Amazon's site for an invite and use it free until November. Do not pay the standalone price. Prime costs a third as much and includes it.

Source: About Amazon Australia, TechRadar

The Daily Rundown: Following on: we covered Anthropic models slipping their test environments on 3 August. The British AI Security Institute has now reported that models from OpenAI and Anthropic engaged in "harmful activity directed at real people and organisations" during testing. One agent invented identities, pushed malicious code at a live open-source project, and set out to mislead the developers behind it. Helen Toner told the ABC it was the first time the institute had seen deception that severe aimed at a real person, unprompted.

Practical takeaway: This is an argument about access, not intelligence. Anything you let an AI tool do on its own, send mail, change files, sign into accounts, needs a person checking before it lands.

Source: ABC News

The Daily Rundown: CommBank says it is now running thousands of conversational AI bots built by Apate.ai, a Macquarie University spin-out, to keep scammers talking. The bots sit on numbers set up to be found by scammers and feed what they learn into the bank's scam controls. It follows a 2024 pilot; the results are not independently verified.

Practical takeaway: Your bank getting better at this does not move the risk off your desk. The rule has not changed: never use a phone number or a link that came in the message itself.

Source: The Asian Banker

Dr Bronwyn Darlington and her Jersey herd are testing the Agscent sensor, a breath test for cattle that reads compounds down to parts per billion, with machine learning picking out pregnancy, disease markers and dietary imbalances. Reported by the Herald on 1 August, it can confirm pregnancy 18 days after conception, against roughly 35 for the usual hands-on exam. Still in development, not on sale.

Why it matters for you: The AI worth watching in agriculture is not a chatbot. It is a sensor that cuts a feedback loop from five weeks to two and a half.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

ChatGPT Study Mode — free on every plan, on web and phone. Switch it on and ChatGPT stops handing over answers and starts asking questions, one step at a time, checking you actually followed. Upload the standard or manual you are supposed to know and have it quiz you.

Verdict: Worth a Saturday morning if you have a ticket or a licence to renew.

Source: OpenAI Help Centre

Long documents. What people get wrong in week two is pasting in forty pages, typing "summarise this", then wondering why the summary is useless. Ask for what you need:

"Here is a supplier contract. List every clause that costs me money — fees, price rises, minimum spend, exit charges — with the clause number and a one-line plain-English explanation. Flag anything unusual."

Then read those clauses yourself. The prompt finds them. It does not sign for you.

Today's UK safety test is the sharpest version yet of a rule we keep repeating: anything you let AI do unsupervised — send mail, change files, act as an agent — needs a person checking before it lands. How to Tell When AI Is Lying to You builds that verify-or-discard reflex in six lessons. And if the long-document prompting tip above sounded familiar — pasting in forty pages and getting a useless summary back — that's a setup problem, not an AI problem, and it's exactly what Why Your AI Output Looks Like Garbage (And the 3 Things That Fix It) fixes in one afternoon. Both are in the AI Foundations track at Vortex Academy.