Councils must view AI as a workforce opportunity, not challenge
"What is the city but the people?"
Shakespeare was right. People are, always have been, and always will be the backbone of Australia's communities, culture and quality of life.
To each other, in our communities, we provide care, love, friendship, support in tough times, essential services and a better quality of living. And over time, technology has enabled us to do this in ways we never would have imagined earlier in our lifetimes. Whether it be computerised library catalogues, online rates payments, or smart rubbish bins, advances in the tools provided to our council workers have allowed them to give more back to our people.
And so just as I tell my clients in business and federal government, councils must think of AI as the next step in empowering people to do more and give more back to our communities.
AI must be seen as a workforce opportunity, not challenge.
This is timely, because the financial and workforce pressures on our councils are arguably the hardest they have been for decades. Budgets and the salaries that can be afforded to council workforce are limited. In Victoria, 62 per cent of responding councils said that salaries and remuneration was the most significant driver of occupational shortages. And to add to this pressure, many skills essential for councils to run effectively are already in significant shortage. 81 per cent of responding Victorian councils reported occupational shortages in 2024–2025, such as building surveyors, engineers, and urban and town planners.
But my time working with corporate and federal government clients has shown that this does not need to be a constraint.
AI will change the skills required, ways of operating, and the breadth and depth of the work your teams can do. This will enrich the lives of council workers, not take away from the quality of their work.
And so, the biggest constraint that councils should worry about is not financial or occupational. Instead, it is emotional: fear. Or, more specifically, the fear of embracing AI when we need it most.
The biggest constraint councils should worry about is not financial or occupational. Instead, it is emotional: fear.
Panic makes people unproductive, making them more cautious and defensive. Academics from Wharton and Boston have argued many avoid AI because it threatens their expertise and autonomy. Others will simply choose to switch off. For Australia, this is particularly pronounced: the University of Melbourne last year found Australians ranked the least optimistic towards AI of 47 surveyed countries.
From retirees to graduates to mums returning from parental leave to software engineers to the most senior and successful executives in business, technology and strategy, almost no person I have ever spoken to is immune to worrying their job will be taken.
Given the daily barrage of newspaper headlines of bold and unproven claims from tech giants that mass job loss is imminent and existential, we cannot be blamed for worrying. But that worry turns into a second job of its own. It tends to make people focus on self-preservation, resist changes and worry about internal politics.
We must instead channel Roosevelt and remind ourselves: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself".
AI provides councils, as it does with all my clients, an opportunity to innovate and reimagine how and what is done for our country and communities.
But let's be clear on the facts of why, so you are armed with them ready for your conversations with your employees.
A job is not a task. A job is a responsibility.
Firstly, a job is not a task. A job is a responsibility.
A maternal and child health nurse does so much more than weigh a baby. They sense how a mother is feeling, and judge how best to discuss a lack of weight gain in the baby. They take the weight history and combine it with context and inferences to judge whether the baby needs medical help. The more that AI helps take notes, records data and provide checklists, the more the nurse can focus on checking her intuition and considering how she best engages with her patients on challenging topics that in that moment, she, not the technology, is responsible for.
Secondly, technology on its own does not create change.
A London School of Economics study of police departments in the United States between 1987 and 2003 found that when departments used computerised record keeping they saw reported crime rise by about 10 per cent as it made crimes easier to report.
However, when combined with a broader management system that used crime data to deploy officers, solve problems and hold managers accountable, the proportion of crimes that resulted in an arrest rose by approximately 2 percentage points (equivalent to approximately a 10 per cent improvement).
AI gives organisations – and councils are no exception – the opportunity to reimagine their operating model.
Counter to what we are frequently being told, AI is not hard to use either, and nor are you and your people too late.
Counter to what we are frequently being told, AI is not hard to use.
In fact, it is the fundamental skills that make us good in the workplace that also make us good with AI. When we are curious, we experiment with AI. When we have good judgement and high standards, we know when to use AI to speed up a process and when we should not. When we bring IQ, we know when to question and how to probe the findings it gives us. When we have EQ, we know what will resonate and what will not. And most importantly, when we are confident, we know where and when we do things better than AI.
And so, with confidence, your people can quickly learn to adapt to AI, and to excel at using it to deliver better outcomes for your community.
Teaching those skills also makes councils a better place to work.
When a Stanford and MIT study looked at more than 5,000 customer service operators given an AI assistant, productivity rose by an average of 15 per cent. By putting the knowledge of the best performers within everyone's reach, those with the least experience gained the most.
When it is hard to pay high salaries — and even when it is not — I tell my clients to give their employees purpose, direction and growth. For a council, purpose exists in your very nature. To provide direction, you must quell any fear of job loss from AI and map out the path ahead.
And to grow your people, to continue to evolve into the community and the city that Shakespeare spoke of, give them the tools, show them how to use them, and importantly, tell them not to fear.
Together with your people, AI will help your cities grow.