G'day.

Welcome all our new subscribers. Three items today are about the free tier — one going up, one going away, and a government warning about who owns the tools you rely on. If you do one thing this morning, check whether you've got research reports sitting inside Microsoft Copilot.

In today’s briefing:

🛡️Australia's spy agency tells boards to treat AI vendor ownership as a cyber risk

📞Aussie Broadband starts handing routine support calls to AI

✅Free ChatGPT text chats are now uncapped

⚠️OpenAI hits pause on a model over cyberattack capability

💸 Copilot's free Deep Research retires 18 August

New guidance from the Australian Signals Directorate, written with the Australian Institute of Company Directors, says foreign ownership of your AI provider is a cyber risk in its own right. It also warns AI is compressing the gap between a flaw being found and exploited "from days to hours".

Why it matters for you: Ask any AI vendor pitching you where your data is processed and who can compel them to hand it over. And don't give a chatbot access to a whole drive when a folder will do.

Source: iTnews

The telco confirmed it's actively looking at AI for repetitive support enquiries, freeing staff for the harder technical ones. Management says it wants staff on current tools but is wary about what data goes into the models, and nothing is announced yet.

Why it matters for you: The caution is the transferable bit. Sorting your enquiries into "routine" and "needs a human" before you buy anything is the actual work.

Source: iTnews

The Daily Rundown: OpenAI announced on 6 August that GPT-5.6 Luna becomes the default model for Free and Go users, and that free accounts get unlimited text chats with it. There's also a new "Think" button for harder questions. Limits still apply to file uploads, images and other tools — this is text chat only.

Practical takeaway: If you talked yourself into a paid plan because you kept hitting the cap, that reason is gone. Cancel for a month and see whether you miss anything. In training rooms the subscription is almost always bought before anyone has established what the free version can't do.

Source: OpenAI

The Daily Rundown: OpenAI paused some work on its upcoming Astra model, saying it could not rule out that the system crosses a critical threshold for cybersecurity capability, and tightened access while it investigates. It's the first time a major lab has publicly held a model back over its ability to run offensive cyber operations. No end date given, and nobody outside OpenAI can verify it either way.

Practical takeaway: This is the ASD's message from the other direction. The basics move the needle more than any AI product: turn on multi-factor authentication, install updates instead of dismissing them, and assume a convincing email is easier to write than it used to be.

Source: Reuters

The Daily Rundown: Microsoft confirmed in mid-July that Deep Research is being retired from the consumer Copilot app from 18 August, along with Copilot Podcasts. The replacement, Researcher, is only for Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers and business accounts with a Copilot licence. Existing reports aren't deleted and can be opened in Word. Podcasts are harsher — those become unreachable entirely, with no export.

Practical takeaway: If you've used Deep Research for anything you'd want again, open it this week and save it to Word. Translated: "changes to how in-depth research experiences are available" means the free version is going behind a subscription.

Source: Microsoft, Thurrott

No single builder put their hand up this week, so here's the sector view. BDO's 2026 Construction Survey of Australian construction businesses, published 3 August, found AI use is now widespread but mostly informal — only 12 per cent use it regularly inside a formal governance framework.

Why it matters for you: Scattered, unstructured use is the norm in construction right now, so you're not behind. One page naming which tools are approved and what never goes into them puts you ahead of most of your competition.

Source: BDO

Tidio Lyro — an AI chat agent that answers website questions from your own FAQs. The free plan includes 50 Lyro conversations in total, not 50 a month, and they don't refresh. Paid access starts around US$32.50 a month. Tidio claims it resolves up to 67 per cent of questions, which is Tidio's own number.

Verdict: Worth burning the 50 free conversations to learn what customers ask. Don't subscribe on the marketing figure.

Chasing money is where small businesses go too soft or blow the relationship up. Give the model the facts and the tone, not just the task:

"Write a short payment reminder for an invoice 21 days overdue. The client is a regular I want to keep. Firm, not apologetic, no threats. Mention the amount and due date, offer to resend the invoice, and ask for a payment date. Under 100 words."

The constraint on tone and length is doing the work. Left alone, the model writes three paragraphs of throat-clearing before it mentions the money.

Today's prompting tip — give the model the facts and the tone, not just the task — is the whole idea behind Talking to AI Like a Person (Not a Search Engine): stop treating AI like a search box and start briefing it like a colleague. And if the Aussie Broadband story landed — sorting enquiries into "routine" versus "needs a human" before you buy anything — that's lesson one of Basic AI Workflows That Save You Hours, which turns exactly that kind of triage into a repeatable process. Both are in the AI Foundations track at Vortex Academy.