Mel runs a one-woman bookkeeping practice in Geelong. She uses ChatGPT to draft client emails, Canva’s AI tools to put together reports, and a free tier of Otter.ai to transcribe her calls. She found all of it herself, through trial and error, because there was no program pointing her toward any of it.

In theory, help exists. The federal government’s $17 million AI Adopt Program promised to connect small businesses with AI tools and expertise through a network of AI Adopt Centres. In practice, the program targets businesses “engaged in international and interstate trade” operating in National Reconstruction Fund priority sectors: advanced manufacturing, critical technologies, medical products. Bookkeeping in Geelong does not make that list. And the program is now closed to new applicants anyway.

This is what inclusion looks like in Australia’s National AI Plan: women named in the text, women not addressed in the funding.

The numbers that matter

Women run a large share of Australian small business. According to ABS data cited by the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, 34.8% of Australian business owner-managers are women. That share has grown 46% over the past 20 years, and according to Xero’s Boss Insights research cited by ASBFEO, women founded roughly two-thirds of new businesses in Australia over the past decade.

They are starting businesses at a faster rate than men. They are adopting AI at a slower one.

The JPMorgan Chase Institute tracked AI adoption among small business owners through to the end of 2025. The result: 19.7% of male-owned small businesses had adopted AI, compared with 17.2% of female-owned businesses. That 2.5 percentage point gap sounds modest. Look at the data by age group and it gets more concerning. Among Gen Z business owners, men were at 20% AI adoption; women sat at 13.9%. A 6.1 percentage point gap, widest among the generation doing the most new business formation.

The gap is not about technology literacy. Deloitte’s global research found women are 22% less likely than men to feel encouraged to use generative AI at work, and 30% less likely to receive generative AI training. Only 18% of women GenAI users reported high trust in data security, compared with 31% of men. These are structural and institutional barriers, not competence gaps.

In Australia’s tech sector specifically, ACS Digital Pulse data from 2024 cited by Women’s Agenda shows women made up just 29% of the tech workforce, against 48% of the overall workforce. The pipeline into AI-adjacent roles is narrow. It is getting narrower.

What the plan says, and what it doesn’t

The National AI Plan, released in December 2025, does name the problem. The plan’s “Spread the Benefits” section states: “We need to give particular consideration to cohorts already disadvantaged by digital and economic gaps, as well as those in roles at higher risk of AI and automation-driven disruption. This includes First Nations people, women, people with disability and remote communities.”

It also commits, under Action 4, to “positively impact participation of underrepresented cohorts in technology, including women, First Nations Australians, and those with disability” through the AI Adopt Program. And under Action 5, the plan specifically flags women as “particularly important” when it comes to groups at “higher risk of disruption.”

The language is there. What follows the language is less convincing.

The $17 million AI Adopt Program is the plan’s primary SME-facing initiative. Set against a $100 billion-plus private data-centre investment pipeline, $460 million in AI research and capability funding, and a $39.9 million National AI Centre expansion, $17 million for the entire SME population is a thin slice. There is no dedicated pathway for women-led businesses within it. The eligibility criteria favour businesses already engaged in international trade and NRF priority sectors, which skews toward industries where men are more represented.

The program is also closed. Applications shut before many small businesses had even heard the plan existed.

What remains for women-owned SMBs is what remains for all SMBs: free resources from the National AI Centre, access to Digital Solutions Program advisers, and whatever they can find themselves. Which is, more or less, what Mel in Geelong was already doing.

No country has solved this cleanly. Canada’s Women Entrepreneurship Strategy provides dedicated research and programming for women founders and is more explicit than Australia’s approach, but it does not have a specific women-plus-AI-plus-SMB program either. The UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan acknowledges the gender gap in AI more directly in its text, but the delivery to date has focused on compute and infrastructure. Australia is not an outlier. It is part of a pattern.

The pipeline paradox

Women are not just underserved as AI adopters. They are overexposed as AI targets. That is what makes the policy gap worse.

Jobs and Skills Australia’s “Our Gen-AI Transition” report, released in 2025, found that the roles most exposed to AI automation are disproportionately held by women: administrative support, content creation, junior professional services. Women’s Agenda described the dynamic bluntly in August 2025: “Just as women are finally making inroads into Australia’s male-dominated ICT sector, AI is threatening to pull up the ladder behind them.”

The JSA data shows what that ladder-pulling looks like in practice. Graduate recruitment in tech fell 50% between 2019 and 2024, partly attributed to AI automating entry-level roles. Those entry-level roles were a primary point of entry for women into the sector.

NINEby9’s APAC research, published in January 2026, put the two-sided problem in plain terms: women remain concentrated in the roles most exposed to automation, while men dominate the emerging AI-driven opportunities.

So women-owned small businesses face a double pressure. As employees, the roles that support them or that they may have left to start their businesses are being automated. As business owners, they are adopting AI more slowly and receiving less targeted support to close the gap. The plan names this risk. It does not fund a response to it.

What you can do now

Policy catches up slowly. In the meantime, these are the resources available to women-led small businesses in Australia right now.

National AI Centre (NAIC): The NAIC provides free guides, templates, and AI readiness resources for small businesses. It is not women-specific, but the resources are practical and free. Start at industry.gov.au/national-ai-centre.

Digital Solutions Program: Government-subsidised digital advice, including AI, for small businesses. Access through business.gov.au. Not AI-specific but advisers can help map tools to your business.

Women’s Agenda and CommBank research: The

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