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Articles that support better decisions around AI, conversion, performance, lead generation, and digital operations.
Latest · 26 Aug 2026
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.
By Jamie Brennan
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.
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