Industry Insider

  • Bunnings Bets on Agents and Saves Half a Million Hours

    An internal AI agent at Bunnings has saved staff half a million hours of administrative work, according to Google, as parent company Wesfarmers deploys agents across its retail portfolio. The figure was cited at Google Cloud's Gemini at Work 2026 event, where the company announced the Gemini agent, a single agent for knowledge work, content creation and coding. 

  • AI Guardrails Lag Behind AI Deployment

    Sixty per cent of Australian workers have personally spotted an error made by an AI tool at work. Almost half say the most significant error they saw had consequences beyond minor inconvenience, including financial, compliance or reputational impact.

  • Automation Anywhere Targets the Front Office

    Customer requests made by voice or chat could soon flow straight through to back-office execution on a single agentic automation platform.  Automation Anywhere has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Boost.ai, an enterprise conversational and voice AI company, from Nordic Capital. 

  • Collibra Targets manual GRC Work with Acquisition

    Agents that work out which AI regulations and standards apply to a system, then test whether its controls work, are coming to Collibra's governance platform, following the acquisition of trail ML, a Munich-based company founded in 2023.

Information & Data Manager

Agent Use Follows Industry Value, Not Hype

Knowledge management is the second most common place in the enterprise where AI agents have reached the scaling phase. Only IT ranks higher, and the gap between them is a single percentage point.

NSW Agencies Cannot Say What AI They Run

All 10 NSW government agencies examined for their use of artificial intelligence keep an AI register. But only four of them record the AI they have formally assessed. The rest of their AI use sits outside any inventory.

icare Tests Market on ECM Consolidation

A NSW government insurer is asking the market how it could collapse four separate document repositories into one. It has also put a number on what it expects to save. The target is a 20 to 30 per cent reduction in annual licensing and maintenance costs.

NZ Review Urges Digital Government Reset

New Zealand's central digital agency has been told to stop delivering projects and start setting standards. It has also been told to open a direct channel to Australia's Digital Transformation Agency and import models that already work. Trans-Tasman sourcing and security collaboration are named as joint opportunities to explore.

Dark Data Emerges as Agentic AI Bottleneck

AI systems in the average large organisation can reach just 45 per cent of company data. In financial services that figure falls to 33 per cent, and in healthcare to 40 per cent. The numbers come from Scaling AI Agents with Trustworthy Data, an MIT Technology Review Insights report sponsored by Google Cloud. It draws on a global survey of 300 senior executives. 

UK Police Database Leak Hits All 43 Forces

A breach has exposed the names, employing organisations and work email addresses of more than 100,000 UK police and criminal justice staff. It appears to have required no malware and no zero-day. A misconfigured permission on a public-facing web portal is the reported cause.

Secured Signing Targets Deepfake Swaps

A digital signer can clear identity verification at the start of a remote witnessing session and be replaced before the document is executed. Secured Signing has released the ID Trust Console, which re-tests the person on screen throughout a video signing meeting rather than once at the door.