AI can help Australia with some of its most pressing challenges.
Challenges
AI Solutions
Australia’s labour productivity has stalled in recent years, with output per hour growing on average only 0.2% per year from 2017–18 to 2023–24.7
AI can help restore productivity growth in Australia.
AI can save time for workers, boost skills, enable new business models, accelerate R&D, improve business efficiency and expand exports.
The combination of slow growth, rising health expenditure and an ageing population is putting increased pressure on government spending and taxation.
AI can help create a more efficient and proactive public sector.
AI tools that automate or reduce administrative tasks could save the average public sector worker 90 hours a year.
Australia’s already hot and dry climate makes it particularly vulnerable to potential negative impacts of climate change. Over the next 35 years, it is expected that the costs of climate and geophysical disasters could more than double.8
AI can make it easier to respond to environmental emergencies.
AI-powered disaster response systems could potentially reduce climate-change induced flood damage by $950 million each year.
AI can help restore productivity growth in Australia.
In the short term, AI’s primary economic impact will come through saving time for workers in administrative tasks, providing the opportunity for significant personal efficiency gains. Over time, this will expand to help with a wider range of tasks, enabling the creation of entirely new products, expanding trade and speeding up innovation itself.
Increasing business efficiency.
AI also can have a significant impact on back-end processes in an organisation. It will also allow for a fundamental redesign of the way many processes in a business are undertaken to be more streamlined. In total, we estimate this accounts for around half of the direct potential productivity benefits from AI.
Expanding trade and exports.
Alongside tariffs, one of the largest barriers to worldwide trade today are so-called ‘non-tariff barriers’, and the administrative burden of documenting your alignment with different regulatory systems. By helping make this process easier, we estimate AI could help boost Australian exports in the region by $230 billion.
Increasing business efficiency.
Early studies have shown that AI helps people do a better quality job and improve their skill set. In total, we estimate this could lead to an average $2,700 increase in economic productivity per worker in Australia.
Speeding up innovation.
R&D is one of the fundamental drivers of economic growth. From engineering to pharmaceuticals, coding to the arts, AI will make it easier and faster to innovate. In total, we estimate that this acceleration of R&D could create an extra $8.4 billion in growth for the Australian economy.
Enabling new businesses.
AI will allow Australian start-ups to create entirely new products and services, enabling new jobs. While it’s hard to predict ahead of time what these will be, one recent study found that 85% of employment growth over the last 80 years is explained by technology-driven creation of new positions.
Saving time for workers.
As the adoption of AI and its deployment continues to grow, we project that it will continue to save time for workers. By the time it is fully rolled out, today’s technology could save the average worker the equivalent of an extra working day a week.
AI could help increase the productivity of Australia’s economy by more than
– or, by itself, the equivalent of the entire last decade of productivity growth.
AI can help create a more efficient and proactive public sector.
In total, we estimate that AI could help increase productivity in the public sector in Australia by 17%. That is the equivalent of freeing up $170 billion in additional resources for the public sector.
We estimate that advances in AI tools could save the average public sector worker 90 hours a year in administrative tasks alone, the equivalent of 13 working days of additional time.
Australians are two times as likely to support the use of AI to diagnose patients (53%) as they are to oppose it (23%), so long as these diagnoses are reviewed by a human doctor.
Heidi Health
is leveraging AI to make healthcare more human.
Heidi Health is an AI-powered clinical scribe designed to reduce administrative burden in healthcare and bring the human element back to medicine. Founded by a former medical trainee with a passion for AI, Heidi was built to solve the growing tension between the ideal of doctor–patient care and the ever increasing demands of documentation. The tool transcribes consultations in real time, automatically generating accurate notes, referral letters, and summaries – allowing clinicians to focus on their patients rather than their keyboards.
After launching in Australian GP practices in 2021, Heidi initially saw slow uptake, but with the mainstream adoption of AI and a growing volume of enthusiastic testimonials – from pediatricians re-engaging with children to GPs saving hours of paperwork – Heidi’s use has exploded. In under two years, it grew from thousands to over a million consultations per week.
Heidi’s rapid scale was supported by Google Cloud infrastructure and a strong partnership with Google’s AI team. Facing infrastructure limits, Heidi migrated its full AI stack to Google Vertex, unlocking reliable latency, compliance with healthcare data rules, and access to cutting-edge models like Gemini. This collaboration is enabling Heidi to pursue its broader vision: not just documenting care, but actively supporting clinical decisions and patient engagement at scale.
“Our goal has always been to put doctors back in the room - to let them focus on care, not paperwork. It’s not just about saving time. It’s about giving clinicians the cognitive space to be better doctors. Working with Google has helped us meet the bar clinicians demand - speed, reliability, and real-world medical performance.”
Dr. Thomas Kelly
Co-Founder and CEO
AI can help improve energy efficiency and savings, making it easier to respond to environmental emergencies quicker.
In total, AI could help optimise energy efficiency by over 9%, saving millions of dollars in energy costs.
Over 60% of Australian adults under 35 said they would be interested or already are using AI to help them…reduce unnecessary household energy usage in their day-to-day life.
By using AI to give more immediate and targeted alerts, we could reduce the damage to property, people and infrastructure created by climate change induced flooding by $950 million a year.
FireSat
AI-powered bushfire detection system.
Google’s Digital Future Initiative has seen a $1 billion investment in Australian infrastructure, research and partnerships to build a stronger digital future for all Australians. This includes partnering with leading bushfire authorities to develop FireSat, a groundbreaking satellite constellation specifically designed to detect and track bushfires when they’re as small as a classroom.
What makes FireSat particularly powerful is its AI implementation. The system rapidly compares any 5×5 meter spot on earth with previous imagery while also factoring in nearby infrastructure and local weather conditions to determine if there’s a fire. This new system is superior to current bushfire detection systems, which typically rely on satellite imagery that is either too low in resolution or updated too infrequently to detect fires before they grow to destructive sizes.
The first FireSat satellite launched in March 2025, with the full constellation to follow in subsequent years. Once fully operational, FireSat will provide near real-time information about the location, size, and intensity of early-stage bushfires, enabling firefighters and emergency responders to respond quicker and more effectively. It will also create a global historical record of fire spread patterns, helping scientists better model and understand bushfire behaviour.