IT Brief: Orca Opti Launches Free AI Governance Tool for Australia

IT Brief Australia covered the launch of Opti Assist Free, ORCA Opti's free, sovereign AI governance assistant for Australian organisations. Written by Mark Tarre, the piece picks the angle that hits closest to CIOs and IT leaders: shadow AI is already inside the organisation, mostly via personal accounts, and the question is whether IT can see it.

The article cites Cyberhaven research showing 85.7 per cent of office-based knowledge workers now use AI at work, 72.8 per cent of them through personal accounts, and that 83.8 per cent of enterprise data flowing into AI tools goes to platforms classified as high or critical risk. Against that backdrop, Opti Assist Free is positioned as the practical first step: signed in with the M365 work or school account, governed by IT, hosted in Australia, with monthly credits for queries, document generation and compliance checks built in.

"Regulators have accepted that AI is inevitable. What they will not accept is organisations being unable to say where their data went, who used it, or which foreign model is now trained on it. That is the visibility gap. Opti Assist Free is how we close it, not by banning AI, but by giving people a version of it they can safely say yes to."

Kathryn Giudes, Founder & Managing Director, ORCA Opti

Read the full article: Orca Opti launches free AI governance tool for Australia (IT Brief Australia, by Mark Tarre)