The end of the “billable hour” grind in Cyber Governance?
Since starting at RMIT I’ve been re-writing several cybersecurity policies, and I am blown away by the speed at which I can get a working draft together using generative AI to instantly align drafts to any required cybersecurity framework.
What used to be a multi-week grind of formatting and cross-referencing is now an afternoon task.
But this efficiency forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth about the professional services industry.
For decades, the consultancy “Leverage Model” has been an open secret:
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Partners sell the engagement.
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Seniors manage the relationship.
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Juniors and grads do the heavy lifting (and the billing).
Now that generative AI can do that heavy lifting in seconds, the economics are breaking. We are seeing a shift where Zero-to-One drafting is effectively free.
The Danger Zone: The real risk isn’t the speed, it’s the liability. We are already seeing the fallout.
Just look at Deloitte Australia recently refunding the federal government for a $440k report that contained hallucinated citations, or the Victorian lawyer stripped of their practicing certificate for submitting fake case law generated by AI.
These aren’t just technical glitches, they are failures of professional oversight where work was passed off as “done” by staff who lacked the domain expertise to audit the output.
The New Value Proposition: The value of a security leader or consultant is no longer in the writing. It’s in the editing.
We need to stop paying for the 80% template work and start valuing the final 20%—the contextualisation, the risk appetite alignment, and the human judgment.
If you’re charging top dollar for work that was mostly done by an intern prompting ChatGPT, you’re on borrowed time.
Where do you see the “Human in the Loop” adding the most value in your governance workflows today?
CyberSecurity CISO GenAI FutureOfWork Governance RMIT
Sources for comments:
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Deloitte refunding Aus Gov for hallucinated report (Oct 2025): The Guardian / AFR Coverage
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Victorian lawyer sanctions (Sep 2025): Guardian Legal Coverage