Weekly bull and bear case deep-dives on AI topics relevant to Australian small business.
Bunnings is expanding AI tools for trade customers. CommBank has its AI assistant. Optus, Telstra, every bank you deal with has a chatbot standing between you and a human being. Australia’s largest businesses are racing to automate their customer service. And the experience, for most of us, is genuinely bad. Small businesses should watch what…
Bunnings announced in June 2026 that it is expanding its AI-powered agentic customer tools beyond retail to serve trade and commercial customers. That is not a tech novelty story. That is Australia’s largest hardware retailer betting that AI can handle real customer relationships at scale, with the people who spend the most. If Bunnings is…
It’s a Wednesday afternoon. A tradie in Blacktown has just spent forty minutes on his laptop manually checking what three competitors are charging for their same-day plumbing callout fee. He’s done this every week for two years. He’s almost certainly not charging enough, and he almost certainly doesn’t know it. This is the problem AI…
A small gift shop in Geelong signs up for an AI pricing tool. They have 800 products. About 200 of them are their own handmade stock with no comparable competitors. Another 300 are locally sourced items with no SKU match in any competitor database. The remaining 300 are generic giftware their wholesaler also sells to…
Most AI tool rollouts fail. Not because the tools are bad, because the people who have to use them every day weren’t brought along for the decision. That gap between “we’re using AI now” and “here’s why and what it means for you” is where projects go to die. The Business Council of Australia released…
The advice to consult workers before adopting AI sounds perfectly sensible. It’s also written for organisations with HR departments, change management teams, and the time to run structured engagement processes. Most Australian small businesses have none of those things. If you’re a tradie running a two-person crew, a café owner with five casual staff, or…
The job losses aren’t dramatic. There’s no mass layoff announcement, no sudden unemployment spike. That’s exactly what makes this harder to see, and more dangerous to ignore. Deloitte identified 82 occupations showing signs of AI disruption in 2026. The ABC’s June 2026 coverage of that report makes the mechanism clear: AI isn’t firing people in…
If AI were eliminating Australian jobs, we’d be seeing it by now. Two years into the AI boom, unemployment is not spiking. Junior office workers haven’t been cleared out. Small businesses aren’t running on skeleton crews. Yes, Deloitte identified 82 occupations facing disruption in 2026. But disruption doesn’t mean elimination. The evidence, the actual numbers…
42% of Australian small businesses are already using AI in some form. If you’re not in that group, EOFY is a reasonable time to ask why. The case for AI at tax time isn’t about letting software lodge your return. It’s simpler than that. AI doesn’t replace your accountant. It makes your accountant’s job faster,…
In June 2026, the ATO made its position clear: “Don’t trust AI or finfluencers this tax time.” Not a footnote. The headline. For a government agency, that’s an unusually direct warning. It’s worth taking seriously. The ATO’s AI is better than yours Here’s the situation that most people miss: the ATO is one of the…