Seventy-seven councils. No two of them the same.

The problem with a sector.

Transformation inside one organisation is hard enough. Transformation across a sector is a different job entirely, because there is no single starting point, no shared budget and nobody who can simply decide.

A large metropolitan council and a small remote shire share a legal framework and almost nothing else. Different populations, different revenue, different staff, different distances, different everything. What counts as a sensible next step for one can be actively wrong for the other.

Roughly half of Queensland's councils are under real financial pressure. That is the backdrop to every conversation about new technology, and any approach that ignores it is decoration.

This is Winton, out west. It is a long way from anywhere and a very long way from a boardroom in Brisbane, and the digital questions they are dealing with are not smaller than a metropolitan council's. They are just different, and nobody solves them by reading a maturity model.

Three years of AI updates, to the same room.

In 2023 the question was whether this was even allowed. In 2024 it was whether we should be worried. By 2026 it had become how do we actually do this well, which is a better question and a much harder one.

Going back to the same conference each year means marking your own homework in public. In 2023 I said AI could lift productivity and improve service, but could not provide creativity, empathy, critical thinking or replicate your experience. Most of that has held. Some of it needed revising, and revising it on stage is the useful part.

By 2026 the adoption race was effectively over. Around three quarters of communications professionals were already using generative AI, and that number had stopped moving. The holdouts were principled rather than late. So the interesting question shifted from whether people are using it to whether they are any good at it.