Hello and welcome to our event today. Greetings to all of you in the room as well as those of you joining us online. We're here to talk about demystifying AI and cyber careers. And about how QUT prepares you for the fast moving tech industry. This panel is brought to you by QUT and Careers with stem.

My name's Jasmine Fellows. I'm the managing editor at Careers with STEM Magazine.

With 500% expected growth in AI related employment between 2023 and 2030, AI and cybersecurity are revolutionizing industries. They're reshaping careers and creating unprecedented demand for experts in these fields. 

Let's kick off by doing a careers with STEM quiz, which has been designed to help you imagine your future in it.

Which of these projects sounds most appealing?

A Design, a new app for AI glasses that helps visually impaired users. 

B, building a new mobile app or video game. 

C. Hacking a website to test security flaws. 

D. Picking the best software solution for a company and its employees. 

E. Improving an online streaming service using powerful cloud computers. 

F. Exploring how quantum computing could change coding or 

G, creating a system to automatically flag issues and improve systems. 

Okay. If you got A, your project is an artificial intelligence one. B, software development, C, cybersecurity, D, business analysis and IT management, E, enterprise computing, F, computer science and G, process analytics and automation.

Okay. Question two, have a think about this one in a team. 

You are most likely to 

A suggest using a suite of AI tools to make life easier. 

B. Volunteer to code the project. 

C. Focus on making sure everything is safe and secure. 

D, clarify your project's goals and talk to all the team members. 

E ensure the project will work no matter how many people are involved.

F break down complex problems into elegant solutions. 

Or G, automate repetitive workflows to speed up your work. 

Okay. Have you got your letter in mind? 

Okay. If it's A, in that team, you're an artificial intelligence person. B, software development, C, cyber cybersecurity, D, business analysis and IT management, E, enterprise computing, F, computer science or G. Process analytics and automation. 

It is Okay. 

You might have one answer that matches both, or you might have two different ones. 

And we've got one more question to help you explore when learning something new. 

You like to A, customize your learning with new technologies like Gemini and Chat GBT

B. Build a website to share the info and flex your skills.

C, understand any risks and problems that might crop up. 

D, consider how the info might solve real world business problems. 

E come up with ideas for a large scale project. 

F. Explore lots of possibilities and ask new questions. 

Or G, look for shortcuts. 

There are ways your learning could be automated or optimized.

So we've got our answers for that one. 

If you've got A, you're thinking artificial intelligence, B, software development, C, cybersecurity, D, business analysis, and IT management, E, enterprise computing, F, computer science, and G, process analytics and automation. 

Okay, so hands up or if you're online, right in the chat.

Unlike other university degrees that focus solely on technical computer science or business oriented IT, the new IT degree at QUT offers a blend of both of these, preparing you to be a versatile graduate that's ready for the world. The program stands out with its emphasis on practical skills, industry relevance and ethical considerations to making it competitive and future focused.

A great choice for your IT education. It also goes just beyond the classroom learning that you might expect. QTS course focuses on giving you real world experience, and that includes doing things like getting real briefs from clients and participating in internship programs, and that offers you that valuable experience to gain connections for future jobs.

This focus on getting you ready to face the real world is a really big part of the course, and it's an exciting opportunity to put your skills to the test.

So when you study this course, you'll have a chance to choose one or possibly more of seven exciting majors, and those majors are perfectly aligned with the quiz that you just did. S

Ultimately, the course is designed to prepare you for the exciting and constantly changing world of technology and equipping you with skills that employers are looking for now and in the future. 

Please welcome to the stage Craig Costello, professor in the School of Computer Science at QUT. Craig works in the application of computational number theory to cryptology. His main research focus for the last decade has been on the design analysis and deployment of quantum resistant cryptography. He obtained his PhD from QUT in 2013, and prior to returning there in 2025, he worked as a principal research scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA.

Next up we have Bimal is a senior data scientist at Flight Centre Travel Group that specialises in AI machine learning, deep neural networks and data visualisation. She uses AI to build systems that optimise processes in industry settings. Bimal is also undertaking her PhD at QUT centred in explainable AI for process predictions, exploring ethical use of AI and how we can design systems in the real world that are both effective and trustworthy.

And, last panelist, John Gooding.

John is a solutions architecture expert at SAP, the Global Technology Company, where he helps businesses use data, cloud technology and artificial intelligence to improve their large scale operations and design smarter decisions. John is passionate about giving back to the next generation of IT and data professionals.

Which he does through teaching and mentoring in his role as adjunct professor in the School of Information Systems at QUT. 

Okay, so earlier I mentioned that the tech council predicts 500% growth in AI related employment from 2023 to 2030. Craig, as a current professor, what kinds of AI and cyber career opportunities are you preparing QUT students for with this growth? 

Yeah, thank you for the question. So at QUT here, uh, we always pride ourselves on making students real world ready and preparing them for the, the types of job opportunities that might come up. 

And with AI developing rapidly in the last few years, there's something very unique about AI in that, unlike any other field, a breakthrough in AI really influences the whole field, not just of science and STEM, but all of human innovation. 

So, a breakthrough in medicine, might not necessarily have any implications in any other fields, but a breakthrough in AI like we've seen in the last few years with, with LLMs and Chat GPT are having bigger implications across the whole academic fields that you can undertake here at QUT. 

So not only in the School of Computer Science, are we trying to tailor the learning to create students and professionals that are really equipped to better AI and to become proficient in making better artificial intelligence itself. 

But we're also tailoring the degrees well outside of the School of Computer Science, across the other sciences, chemistry, biology, things like that, all of those degrees are having to adapt to this change and make modifications to incorporate AI into their degrees.

So, at QUT we are trying to produce people that are ready to take on real world opportunities, who are equipped, as experts in AI. But we're also trying to train people in adjacent and other fields. 

I guess as a magazine editor, I'm seeing all these articles coming through at the moment where, you know, AI is the current frontier, but maybe quantum. Is the next thing beyond that.

Yeah. My expertise is not in AI, it's in cybersecurity. And one of the big problems I've been working on for the last decade plus has been in trying to predict where the future is going and where the job opportunities are going in cybersecurity.

We have to try to predict where the future hackers are going to come from and what sort of tools and techniques they're going to use. 

So the problem I've been working on is if the hacker of the future will be equipped with a quantum computer. So quantum computing is constantly being touted as the next big thing.

And we're constantly anticipating when it's going to come. 

But in the field of cybersecurity, which is where I work, we've been scared about quantum computers for a long time before they were mainstream, and we're still scared of them, but we're trying to work rapidly to try to make sure that the internet is secure, using advanced kind of mathematical techniques that'll hopefully foil the quantum attackers.

It's a completely different type of physics and computing than what we're used to, but once you get into the details, it's extremely interesting and really exciting what the frontiers of quantum computing are going to bring. 

I'm going to throw to John next as a mentor and with your insight into the industry.

What sort of jobs do you think will be available to today's students? 

Aligned with what Craig was mentioning, you can think of all the traditional roles that are out there with the industry. And I think there's certainly the AI complimenting those current roles, but then there's the ability of creating the AI components for new roles and those existing roles.

So customers are extending on their current skill sets to get into AI and extend on their current roles, but as also as part of their current businesses. They all have AI specialist team who go through and create new initiatives and doing it from the ground up on certain areas of their business that they haven't done before.

So we cover most industries and ones that we've seen as quick early adopters are the mining industry where they have a range of asset data. You also have it in healthcare, medicine and finance as well. 

So there's certainly net new capabilities of AI skills and extending on existing skills that professionals would have. 

So let's drill a little bit deeper into these jobs in terms of what a job looks like. 

So Ali, can you tell us a little bit about what a day in the life of your job looks like?

Thanks Jasmine.

My job. I use AI to optimise processes and workflows. 

Mainly the parts of work that people no longer enjoy, mundane, repetitive. I work mostly talking to people, understand the business process and understanding the pain points.

And then the other two days is actually I work with AI and like the technical front. How to make these processes more optimised, with the help of AI because AI, the one based on LLMs is revolutionizing the way we look at traditional, unstructured data. 

That means like the text data, the image data that was previously interpreted only by humans in effective way.

But now AI can make a good judgment. That helps us. Make them better. 

AI can make people more efficient and do things that they enjoy. I recently optimised a workflow that actually helped to release the person who was doing it.

She was basically doing it around the clock. Seven days a week, she was not enjoying it. So with this new optimized workflow in place, it actually helped her to move on to like a better role in her career. 

The common ones people know are things like chatGPT and Gemini. I mostly work with OpenAI because we work with Microsoft Azure. Because when you work in an organisation setting, you deal with AI governance, and privacy concerns.

So it is a necessity that we stick to one cloud provider and all the customer data lies in one geographical area. So because of that, we use OpenAI. 

And John, could you tell us a little bit about a day and the life at your work? 

Yeah, so for me it's quite diverse. I've obviously been around for a while and I've gone through quite a few different versions of what a day in the life is. 

So, currently I go visit clients. I work with large, companies and help them with their data analytics.

And as part of those data analytics engagements that we do, we normally work through sample use cases and find scenarios where AI will benefit them more in profitability or giving back to the public. 

So depending on what their focus is as a business or a government entity is where we support them, in either helping with more automation. But even those data sets that we are using we liked to create mock data and that used to take a while to create manually. 

Now we use the AI tools and we have our own LLMs to generate the code for us, that would now write the lines of code for me to create that mock data as an example. So utilising the AI tools is in our kit bag.

But also in a day in the life of me, would be working with customers to help them with their AI strategies. 

So we've hinted already that there can be some concerns about implementing new technology when it comes to things like data privacy and governance.

For AI, we are hearing stories about this ethical concern every week. 

Headlines include things like why Gen Z are boycotting chatGPT, and one was about the environmental impact of generative AI. 

And then there are tens of thousands of creatives signed a petition against unlicensed generative AI training and are really concerned about the copyright and how those AIs are trained.

As a current PhD student studying at QUT, you're working on how to make AI systems effective and trustworthy. What are your thoughts on these concerns? 

We cannot overlook those concerns and they're real, because if you look at the LLM, that's basically like about 2000 lines of code, but the magic is behind all the processing that it does consume lots of resources.

And using training data without proper licensing, that's also true. We are in a place where there are a lot of ethical dilemmas.

I think it's up to us how these things work and what are the implications of this, because AI requires proper regulation. My personal belief, and a lot of experts agree as well.

For an example, if you've heard about hallucinations. Hallucinations are basically AI making up things that are not real because AI doesn't have accountability like humans do. If trained appropriately, it would lie worse than a pathological liar.

There's a lot of research that has to be done. 

So if you're like a hardcore computer scientist or mathematician, that can be a place that you could see yourself in. It needs of people to govern and make it efficient and make it good for society. So that's where I see like the future, a lot of future bright minds can pitch in.

I think it's a really important question and it's been really exciting to see how QUT has been addressing this in terms of training students and getting them thinking about it when they're studying. 

So Craig, it's not just AI. With your experience in cybersecurity, do you see this as an opportunity for students? What types of careers are available ensuring data privacy and security? 

Yeah, great question. Thank you. 

Once upon a time when I was your age, I knew I wanted to be, a cryptographer. 

I was really excited by the field, but at that time I was going to go into theoretical research or I was going to try to work for the government in defence analytics, working behind the scenes.

Nowadays the landscape has changed completely. The more data driven and data dependent our lives become, the more technology advances, the more, data centric we become as a society. Data's the economy of the internet.

So it is more important for that data to be protected and the more job openings there are across the board. 

So, that once upon a time story is no longer true. It's nowadays, any division you can think of that uses data and depends on data, they need cybersecurity specialists to protect the data.

So whether you're talking about the banks, banks all have their own cybersecurity divisions. 

Whatever field of passion or interest, there's probably some level of data dependency there, and therefore there's probably some need to protect that data and some need for cybersecurity analysts and professionals.

And even with the advent of AI itself, that's totally changed the attack landscape again. 

So hackers are trying to use AI to get into systems. That's made our life more difficult. But we're trying to use AI to help defend systems as well. Which makes life more easy in some scenarios too.

So, the field's ever evolving and ever changing and I think the more we progress the more cybersecurity professionals are needed. 

There's the other classic, which is, will AI take my job?

John, do you think that's true? Will AI take our jobs? 

It will change your job if you're in a current role and in that space. 

So obviously there'll be more AI agents in typical workflows as well. So that will automate a lot of processes, it's still going to need the validation of someone to say, yes, it's okay.

Customers still need to submit tax returns and do all those things and run businesses as well. Which I think will never be automated fully by AI. 

So there's still a massive amount of business processes, business capabilities that'll be run by humans, but it will be supplemented and accelerated by ai.

You've talked a little bit about this already. Can you expand a little on that? 

That was my personal experience where AI was actually used in a way to enhance one's career. But again, I agree with John that it would transform the jobs as we see today, because if you really look at most jobs, we have a part that we love. 

We have a part that we hate, so why don't we give it to AI, the part that we hate.

If you know what the beast is, you are in a better position to tackle it. If you ignore it, then you wouldn't know when it comes and bites you.

I encourage everyone to know what AI is, what AI does, and what you can do with AI.

Because right now you may have heard about amazing tools like Lovable, which let you to come up with your own application just with natural language.

It's not like production ready, but we didn't have it existing about two years ago.

So it helps you to be a Hyper creator. You can create lots of things, but again, the danger is that it could make you a hyper consumer as well because AI can give you lots of things to consume. 

I hadn't heard the term hyper creative before, what, what does that mean? 

Now, to take one idea to life, it'll take time, but now you can actually take multiple ideas, and see what works. Because it's fast, you can get those outputs faster. 

It enables you to bring your ideas to life at a scale that was unprecedented. 

Craig, I was going to get you to weigh in on this question as well, but this idea of creativity has just arisen, and maybe we can unpick that a little bit because there's the creativity of the AIs, but also the creativity of the humans.

Will AI be able to replicate this kind of creativity like that is normally thought of as human? 

Is it coming to take all our jobs? 

I would say as long as you are willing to learn it and use it, just like the fellow panellists here have been saying, it's going to make you better at your job. 

It might come for your job if you don't do anything about it, and you wait and see how it's going to go. 

But if you come to QUT and you learn how to you learn, you either become an expert in AI or you learn how to use AI in your chosen field it's much less likely to come for your job.

I think even five years ago I was kind of naive and being a researcher where my job is to kind of try to come up with in computational number theory come up with new theorems and new mathematical ideas. I was thinking, we'll be one of the last fields for AI to come after my job because it could be trained on all this data, but surely it can't come up with new ideas that haven't been thought of before.

I was very, very wrong about that. 

I've heard predictions that the first PhD thesis will be written by an AI, if it hasn't already, it will be in the next five years, which necessarily means AI is coming up with new ideas that no one's thought of or no one's ventured to discover before.

So I think in terms of the creativity, to come to something Ali said, it does take a lot of the mundane side of your job away if you want it to. 

if you want to use it as a tool, you can, you can get it to write code for you. That's quite good. You can get it to do all those kind of mundane tasks.

The landscape for what makes us human and what makes us creative as human beings to be more creative with the things that AI can't do. 

Oh, that's very reassuring. Thanks Greg. 

Craig, I had to add to that, using AI to do your assignments is not a right way to do it, so public service reminder right there from Bimal. Thank you. 

But Molly, my question is around your comment that the beauty of AI is it gives us the opportunity to offload those things that we find boring, mundane, repetitive. 

And as an educator, I have concerns that some students might think, well, I find learning to be that. How do we get students, to appreciate that it's the higher order things that separate you from AI.

Please don't export that to AI. 

Yes, so my opinion is that I don't know. I have a child in primary school, and he has a very engaging classroom. Like a lot of things are done in class. They discuss a lot of things, discuss ideas, because they're not given assignments, I think.

Maybe the future of education might have to change away from take home assignments as opposed to freely discuss ideas, no stupid ideas working as teams. 

So that's what I see would be coming in. And I believe it gives teachers more time to engage with kids at a personal level because now they don't have to fill all the sheets.

I don't know how it is in the high school level.

Excellent. It does seem like a good time to start opening up for audience questions.

So can AI get me a job and how soon can it get me a job?

Even as a student? Can it help?

John, with your experience in industry, what do you think? 

I absolutely agree that it could help you get a role and as certainly from an entry point of applying for roles, you've got the ability and experience with AI.

I've got a son who's installed a large language model on his laptop and it’s like having Google offline. So literally he gets his understanding around that, but it gives him an experience to go into a role. And say, okay, I've got some competency already.

Don't just go for a generic resume, AI could help you with that personalisation. 

But also the open source material that is out there would certainly help you get across all of these capabilities that we've been speaking about. 

And Craig, how are you seeing this with students that you're working with?

if you are adopting it as a tool, I think you're going to have an advantage over those who don't.

If you at least give yourself a little bit of education on how to use these AI tools, you can use them without really knowing how they work, then you're going to get an advantage over those people who don't. 

The things that are boring about your job or the things that you have to do, rather than you want, the things you want to do, AI's there to help you with those things. 

Do we have any questions from the audience online?

In the cybersecurity industry, what are the most important like skills that you would need for a career? 

There's kind of two different flavours of people who are really successful in cybersecurity. 

Some people like to do the defensive work, constructing things and making them bulletproof from a constructive angle.

And then there's people who just liking to break things. 

And if you are someone who grows up liking to screw with systems and test things and try to break things and make them not work, you can be really successful in a cybersecurity profession as well.

You go to a company and say, I'm going to try to get in, or I'm going to try to make your website crash or do it. What we call penetration testing. 

People that just have a knack for screwing with things can go really, far in cybersecurity. 

But again, I would come back to it being problem solving. If you're someone that likes solving problems, you don't have to be a maths whiz or a tech nerd a anymore, once upon a time in the nineties, maybe you had to be a maths whiz or a tech nerd to be able to program in the first place.

But nowadays, I see a lot more diversity in the cybersecurity professions. 

Communication skills go a lot further than they used to because the stereotypes that we used to have in tech and cybersecurity were nerds that couldn't communicate or hold a conversation very well.

Whereas nowadays that's totally changed because, the landscape's evolving. 

People that have good communication skills go a long way in cybersecurity too. 

Hey, I've got a question for Mr. Castello specifically. 

What is the future of AI technology in cybersecurity look like in 10 years time? 

And how can you use that technology to face issues or problems such as you mentioned earlier, using quantum technology like hacking tools.

It's a really tough question, the future of AI and cybersecurity in 10 years. 

I don't know. With AI and cybersecurity in 10 years, at the moment, I'm aware of a few projects and I'm interested in getting into this line of work myself, but we are trying to use, LLMs to break crypto systems that appear to be strong. 

These systems that we look at are based on hard mathematical problems that apparently no humans can solve, but maybe the AI can.

I'm aware of several works that are trying to use LLMs to break cryptography, which is really interesting. 

No success yet, which is good. But maybe there will be, and on the quantum side yeah, the quantum side is a lot more clear.

On the quantum side we're sure that when a quantum computer is built, a large scale quantum computer is built, all of the cryptography that we currently use is broken.

The Australian government's invested a billion dollars to build one in Brisbane, and if they succeed, cybersecurity will be under threat that day. 

Hopefully we can secure the systems before someone successfully builds such a computer. 

We've got another question over here. 

What exactly is the difference between being an ethical hacker and a penetration tester? 

Like does it have a lot of overlap or are they like different? 

Hopefully, um, hopefully there is no difference. Hopefully if you are, um, a pen tester, you're doing it ethically.

Of course, there's the people that keep me in a job. People who aren't doing it ethically, they're doing it for malicious reasons, they're doing it to make big money. 

You can make a lot of money out of being an unethical hacker that goes around looking for holes in systems and then rather than exploiting them yourself.

If you were really good at hacking, but you didn't want to be the one to exploit them, you can put them on the black market and say, I've found a hole in Microsoft windows. 

And sell it to the highest bidder and maybe a foreign government will come and say we want to use that. You can make a lot of money without actually being the one to exploit it.

But hopefully, if you are a pen, you're a good pen tester. We're not giving you ideas here. 

Thank you to everyone who asked questions. They were really excellent. Please give a warm round of applause to our panel.

Thanks for helping us to demystify these AI and cyber careers.

 So I've got a few questions for the audience before I go. Hands up if you feel like you know more about AI and cyber careers now. Great. Have you learned about an area of tech you've never heard of before? Oh yeah, maybe a couple. And do you have a good idea of the type of study you'd need to do to take on a career in it?