Australian Securities & Investments Commission Chair sets out director duty expectations and flags simplification and AI governance work

In a keynote address to the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ Australian Governance Summit, Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) Chair Joe Longo framed directorship as an increasingly high-risk role and highlighted the regulator’s focus on director engagement with risk, particularly where governance failures can drive consumer and investor harm. Longo pointed to Justice Michael Lee’s liability judgment in ASIC’s Star Entertainment proceedings as a key recent reference point on the management-board divide and directors’ obligations to engage actively with information, rather than substituting reliance on management or citing information volume as a defence. He also set out ASIC’s work to reduce regulatory complexity, including simplifying ASIC instruments, improving access to regulatory guidance, and running pilots aimed at making ASIC processes easier for small business directors. On innovation and technology, he referenced ASIC’s review of the ASIC Innovation Hub and identified planned work including convening a senior roundtable on future regulatory models for financial market infrastructure, alongside an operational pilot using advanced supercomputing to explore early signal intelligence in life insurance claims and disputes. The speech also flagged AI as a growing governance issue, citing ASIC’s earlier work on AI adoption by financial services licensees that identified a governance gap, and warning that agentic AI could heighten autonomy and unpredictability risks. Next steps highlighted were improving digital interactions with ASIC, exploring opportunities with Treasury to streamline the regulatory framework, convening the proposed financial market infrastructure roundtable, and refreshing ASIC’s research on AI use by financial services licensees.