Jamie Brennan is a Melbourne-based full-stack developer with 16 years of commercial experience across agencies, startups, platforms, and product teams. He is the founder and lead developer of Func. digital, and currently Lead Developer at Point Hacks, Australia's leading travel rewards and points platform.
Originally from Ireland, Jamie has worked across Belfast, Sydney, and Melbourne, building high-performance web applications and digital experiences from bespoke CMS platforms to modern JavaScript at scale.
He writes about websites, automation, AI workflows, lead generation, and digital operations for small and medium businesses. His areas of focus include clean code, well-crafted interfaces, accessibility, performance, and technical SEO.
Everything published on Func. digital follows our editorial policy.
Articles
Nobody in this industry publishes prices, which makes it very hard to work out whether automating something is worth it. Here are real numbers: what a build costs, what it costs to run, and how to tell before you spend anything whether the maths works.
Metcash is exploring agentic AI that would place a retailer's routine orders automatically. It is genuinely useful, and it quietly removes the moment where you decide whether to buy from someone else. Here is what it means for both sides of your business.
A new Joint Select Committee is investigating why AI adoption has stalled among smaller Australian businesses, reporting in November. From where we sit, the barrier is not cost, access or advice. It is that nobody owns the integration.
Mastercard went down for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon. Google Drive went down for 13 hours on a Wednesday. Both were routine internal changes, not attacks. Here is the one-page outage plan for a business with no IT department.
Canva slowed its own AI rollout and rebuilt its architecture because the cost of serving each AI task did not stack up. If per-task cost can bite a company that size, it is worth understanding before a small business buys any AI at all.
Sophiie AI just raised $5 million to take admin off trades businesses, citing 16 hours a week lost per tradie. The number is the real story. Here is how a Melbourne service business claws most of it back without buying anything that big.
Airtasker has shipped a ChatGPT plugin and an MCP server, so a customer can post, price and assign a job without ever leaving the chat. Here is what that changes for a Melbourne service business whose only front door is a website.
The panel that pops up next to a Google search, with your hours, photos and reviews, is the first thing most local customers see. It is free, it now feeds the AI answers too, and almost everyone claims it once and never touches it again.
A new Autodesk report puts Australian construction second in the world for tech adoption. Its headline finding is the one worth reading: the firms with the most tools are not the ones winning. The ones connecting them are.
Amazon has switched on five-hour delivery windows in Melbourne. No local business is going to out-run that, and trying is a waste. Here is where a Melbourne business actually beats Amazon, and how your website decides whether you get to.
Before a stranger calls, books, or walks in, they check your reviews. So does the AI deciding whether to recommend you. Most local businesses leave that entirely to chance. Building a simple system for reviews is cheap, ethical, and it compounds.
A voice-AI called Sadie now answers restaurant phones, takes the order and payment, and pushes it straight into Square, with no staff involved. The missed-call leak it plugs is not a hospitality problem. It is every phone-run business's problem.
A stranger lands on your homepage and decides in about five seconds whether to stay. Most homepages spend that window on a pretty photo and the word Welcome. Here is what the highest-leverage page on your site actually has to do.
The ATO has warned taxpayers to ignore tax advice from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini unless a professional checks it. It is not anti-AI. It is the clearest statement yet of the one line that decides whether AI helps your business or burns it.
You spend real money getting enquiries, then let them go cold. The research is brutal: reply within five minutes and you are far more likely to win. Speed to lead is the cheapest edge a business has, and it is mostly a systems problem.
The government has launched a free AI Information Line for small businesses, where an AI voice agent gives you options and a written summary. Genuinely useful as a first step. Just don't mistake the advice for the working system.
Your customers decide they need you at 9pm. If the only way to book is to call you tomorrow, half of them won't. Online booking is the rare growth lever that is cheap, quick, and quietly ignored by most Melbourne service businesses.
150+ exhibitors, free entry, your whole audience under one roof at MCEC on 29-30 July. But expo leads convert that night, when they look you up. Here is the digital homework worth doing before you go.
Canva just launched a tool that builds you a website from a text prompt, then warned that AI-made sites all look the same. When anyone can spin up a passable site in an afternoon, the edge moves to what a prompt can't hand you.
New research puts hard numbers on the local-search shift: AI Overviews appear on 68% of local searches, and 98.8% of local businesses are invisible in AI recommendations. You can rank number one and still watch the calls dry up.
Meta proposed letting anyone use public Instagram photos to generate AI images, then pulled it in three days. The reversal is not the story. The story is that your business is living on land someone else can re-zone with three days' notice.
Google has published its guidance on appearing in AI search, and the honest summary is that it is simpler than most people are selling. But Google only speaks for Google, and Google is the channel that is shrinking.
Albanese has unveiled a world-first National AI Plan, a new Office of AI and a safety institute. Most of it is national-scale. But there is real grant money for small businesses to trial AI, and a clear signal for the rest. Here is the Melbourne-SME read.
OpenAI's new ChatGPT Work plugs an AI agent into the apps your business already runs and lets it do multi-step work. It is a real shift. But a connector is not a system, and the difference is where the value and the risk both live.
New research shows a third of Australian workers use AI on the job without telling their employer. Banning it just drives the productivity underground and leaves the risks in place. Here is the smarter response for a Melbourne business.
The federal Digital Solutions program relaunched in July 2026 with a new focus on AI and emerging tech. For a Melbourne small business it is a genuinely useful, low-cost on-ramp. Here is what it covers, what it does not, and how to turn a free webinar into an actual result.
Agentic commerce is not just a retail story. AI agents will find and book service businesses, and they will run your back office. Here is the calm, practical way for a Melbourne business to get ahead of it.
Australia has banned subscription traps, hidden fees and manipulative website design, effective 1 July 2027. It reads like a compliance story, but almost every rule is about what your website does. Here is the plain-English to-do list.
OpenAI is opening ChatGPT advertising to smaller businesses with a self-serve tool. A new place to get found is worth understanding, but it is not worth rushing into. Here is what a Melbourne business should actually do.
New data shows visitors arriving from AI assistants like ChatGPT convert better than Google organic search. Fewer clicks, warmer customers, and you can finally measure it. Here is what that means for your website.
Agentic commerce has landed in Australia: AI agents that search, compare and check out for a customer. Big retailers are split between joining in and blocking it. Here is what the shift means for a Melbourne business that isn't a national chain.
Shopping agents that research, compare and buy on a customer's behalf are now live in Australia. When the customer never sees a results page, the businesses an agent can actually read are the only ones in the running.
The US has lifted its export ban on Anthropic's frontier AI models, with Australian access returning from 1 July. Before you switch everything back on, use the restart to fix what the outage exposed.
The 2026 Victorian budget backs SMEs with a new Small Business Activation Fund and a $14 million AI package. A grant only pays off if it fixes the system underneath, not if it buys one more tool nobody uses.
Australians are starting to ask ChatGPT and Gemini for a good local plumber or accountant instead of scrolling Google. Here is what a Melbourne small business can actually do to be the name the AI gives back.
Anthropic just put Claude inside Slack as a shared team assistant. The interesting part for a small business is not the chatbot, it is where AI is finally showing up: inside the work you already do.
New Indeed data shows AI hasn't dented Australian hiring the way the headlines promised. For a small business that reframes the question: not who does AI replace, but which tasks should it take off your people.
The City of Melbourne has expanded its Business Growth and Impact Grants into four streams. For businesses ready to scale, the highest-leverage place to put the money is the least glamorous one: the digital systems and automation that stop growth turning into admin chaos.
Australian SME AI adoption nearly doubled to 69% in eighteen months, and nearly four in five users now report productivity gains. The thing holding the last third back is confidence, not capability.
A 2026 report found 84.8% of Australian businesses show up in Google, but only 12.3% appear in AI search. That gap is where high-intent leads are quietly walking out a door owners cannot see.
A US national-security directive just cut Australian businesses off from Anthropic's frontier models. The lesson is not about one vendor — it is about how much of your operation runs on a switch someone else controls.
Slow pages are not just annoying. They quietly cost enquiries, search visibility, and ad budget. Here is what the numbers say and what a Melbourne service business can do about it.
43% of Australian SMEs report using AI, but only 12% say it has genuinely transformed their business. The gap is not adoption — it is workflow change.
Using ChatGPT is not an AI strategy. Here are three automations a Melbourne service business can ship this quarter by embedding AI in its CRM and operations.
Digital agencies in Melbourne are moving beyond traditional website delivery as AI changes discovery, content, and customer expectations.
Speed is not just a technical metric. It shapes trust, search visibility, conversion, and how easy the site is to maintain.
A practical v1 website should make the business clear, publish useful content, and stay easy to maintain.
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