As AI proliferates across the Australian business landscape, leading corporates and industry bodies are planning to expand their custom AI-powered agents beyond the boardroom and into their wider organisations.
Speaking to SmartCompany, representatives of Telstra and the Real Estate Institute of NSW (REINSW) say they plan to build out their C-suite agents to assist workers and members with a variety of administrative tasks.
While AI agents have rapidly became the norm in many workplace departments such as customer service or HR, the development shows how some organisations are leveraging AI tools further up the corporate ladder.
Related Article Block Placeholder Article ID: 346320
But the repurposed agents come at a pivotal moment for AI technology, as companies balance the promise of speedy decision-making with the need to maintain governance and data privacy.
A new home for AI real estate expert
REINSW is hoping to give its members an AI bot with the same capabilities as its AI board agent, Alice Ing.
Smarter business news. Straight to your inbox.
For startup founders, small businesses and leaders. Build sharper instincts and better strategy by learning from Australia’s smartest business minds. Sign up for free.
By continuing, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
Alice Ing (initials AI) was first ‘employed’ in 2024, with the peak real estate industry body boasting its purported IQ of 155 could assist the board with statistical, legal and ethical questions.
REINSW has roughly 2,546 company members and 10,953 individual members, and is now planning to make Alice available to its affiliates as a “personal advisor”, according to CEO Tim McKibbin.
McKibbin told SmartCompany each AI bot will have the same capabilities as Alice, with information customised to their needs.
“They will be able to load into the bot the information that is unique to them. We would put into every bot all of the information about agency practice, and then we would say to the agency that you could put into your bot things that are unique to your office.”
This would cover everything from names through to policies, enabling the office bot to assist staff with a multitude of tasks, including onboarding.
McKibbin said users of the system will be able to “dictate how they want the answers delivered to them, and what is important to them uniquely”.
“That is going to change a lot of accepted practices within the real estate industry,” he added.
“We can expect to see that right across our society. It’s going to be a very exciting time.”
McKibbin believes the next two years will be “incredibly exciting” and that larger businesses “need to be thinking about a resource that is able to monitor the development of the tech solutions and implement them into their office”.
Telstra “moving beyond the boardroom”
Meanwhile, telecommunications giant Telstra has already found its own AI board agent “useful in a variety of ways”.
Company secretary and legal executive Craig Emery told SmartCompany the telco is “moving beyond the boardroom to how we help prepare for and capture board meetings”.
“We have an agent in testing to help prepare board minutes based on the company secretary’s notes of the meeting, and we have created a Copilot ‘super prompt’,” he said.
Related Article Block Placeholder Article ID: 302080
Emery said this helps users prepare board papers by applying approved style guides, readability metrics, and templates to improve corporate governance processes.
“Beyond expected use cases like summaries of prior papers on particular issues, directors have used the agent to clarify questions they have when preparing for meetings, or to remind themselves of where a discussion about a particular topic has got to,” he added.
Telstra launched its own board AI in June to help directors prepare for meetings by making it easier to sift through information and add more time for priority tasks.
At the time, the company said its board AI agent doesn’t make decisions or advise, but can summarise and check papers or resolutions.
The SME AI adoption checklist
While larger organisations are planning the use of AI agents up and down their org chart, the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) is calling on directors not to outsource their most critical duties — or the work of their staff — entirely to AI.
In its guide for company directors, published in June, the AICD urged directors to be wary of “inaccurate or biased AI outputs leading to poor decisions and reputational damage”.
At the same time, it called for caution when exposing broader teams to AI agents, noting the risk of “limited oversight and weak staff skills and knowledge due to resource constraints, including an over-reliance on external vendors”.
Emery said Telstra did “a lot of testing before releasing the tool to ensure the roll-out went smoothly”.
Operating in a ‘walled garden’, the bot sits within Telstra’s internal environment and was developed via its data and AI joint venture with Accenture.
“All directors completed Telstra’s responsible AI training, which is mandatory for anyone at Telstra before they use an AI tool in their work,” explained Emery.
“This training includes, amongst other things, advice on the need to critically evaluate AI outputs.”
While there have been high profile cases of AI agents accessing data without permission, McKibbin confirmed Alice is located within a secure information environment.
“Alice is not able to go outside of the immediate data banks that we’ve given her”, he said, with this information firewall serving as a vital safeguard.
“She’s locked inside of the information we give her, so her chances of getting something wrong are remote, because she’s only looking at the information we give her now.”
Other resources provided by the AICD reflect the genuine benefits AI tools can have for smaller organisations, both in decision-making roles and beyond.
It found “resourcing constraints” of smaller businesses “should not be a defining barrier to the effective trialling of AI and its adoption”.
“The boards of SMEs and NFPs [not-for-profits] can play a key role in providing practical, and sometimes hands-on, support for AI investments,” said the AICD.