How to set up practical AI governance using the Voluntary AI Safety Standard and existing privacy and consumer law.

dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC), and dgm has no completed client integrations yet.

Responsible AI governance in Australia does not require a new compliance department — it means applying the Voluntary AI Safety Standard and existing law in a practical way. Here is how.

Start with the guardrails

The Voluntary AI Safety Standard’s 10 guardrails (DISR, 2024) are a ready-made governance framework: accountability and governance, risk management, data governance and security, testing and monitoring, human oversight, transparency, contestability, supply-chain transparency and record-keeping. They are voluntary, but they map to obligations you already have.

Tie it to existing law

As of 2026 Australia has no standalone AI Act in force. The Voluntary AI Safety Standard (10 guardrails, published by DISR in September 2024) is guidance, not law, and the proposed mandatory guardrails for high-risk AI were not enacted — the December 2025 National AI Plan relies instead on existing technology-neutral laws and sector regulators. So the binding constraints on business AI are existing laws: the Privacy Act 1988, the Australian Consumer Law and sector rules. Good governance means meeting these obligations deliberately — privacy by design under the Privacy Act, no misleading conduct under the Australian Consumer Law, and your sector’s rules — plus preparing for the APP 1.7 automated-decision transparency rule that commences in December 2026.

Make it practical

Assign an owner, keep an AI inventory, document risk for significant uses, keep humans in the loop, and log decisions. osFoundry is a model-agnostic, bring-your-own-key (BYOK) AI orchestration platform — usage-based pricing with no per-seat fees, local-first and self-hostable, with per-region data pinning (US, EU or Japan) or deployment into your own cloud. Its audit logging and configuration controls support several guardrails. osFoundry’s managed cloud pins data to the US, EU or Japan — it does not currently offer an Australian managed region. For data that must stay in Australia, the honest path is self-hosting osFoundry (BYO Cloud) inside an Australian cloud region such as AWS (Sydney or Melbourne), Microsoft Azure (Australia East, Australia Southeast or Australia Central in Canberra) or Google Cloud (Sydney or Melbourne), or running models locally on-device.

Where dgm fits

dgm is an independent integration partner that helps Australian businesses adopt osFoundry — scoping a first use case, handling the build, and connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm is independent of osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has no completed client integrations yet, so everything described here is a service offered, not a past result. If you want to scope a practical first project, dgm can help you map it out.