AI, Emerging Technologies, and Digital Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges

Benji Crooks, Marketing Director at Public Sector Network, sits down with Derek Madden (CEO, Moorabool Shire Council) to discuss where AI is delivering practical value in local government, why councils are starting with high-volume, data-ready work, and how trust frameworks, staff training, and fit-for-purpose governance can build confidence and scale responsible AI while improving productivity and service delivery before his panel discussion at Local Government Focus Day in Victoria.

Can you introduce yourself, your role as CEO, and a quick snapshot of Moorabool Shire Council and what you’re responsible for?

Yeah. My name is Derek Madden, and I’ve been the CEO of Moorbal Shire Council now for seven years.

Moorbal Shire is the quintessential peri-urban council. We’re located between Ballarat, Geelong and Melbourne, and we’ve got the big councils of Melton and Wyndham basically in front of us as well. So we’re caught in that really growth phase, and I suppose my job as the CEO is to ensure that:

1. the organisation is financially sustainable,

2. we deliver the services that people rely on on a day-to-day basis, and

3. we build capacity within the organisation.

That’s probably where a lot of the focus has been, probably for the last two to three years, on that capacity, and really trying to deliver more services with less.

At a high level, where do you see AI being introduced across council first, and why those areas?

Yeah, I suppose from my experience, what we’ve done with AI is not necessarily the big flashy project. Where we’ve seen it within the organisation is where high volumes are happening, where there’s lots of manual handling, and probably where we know the information we have is solid, so the data is 100% correct.

So there’s certain areas within council where that’s helped. Things like customer service, our internal inquiries through HR, or through governance, those data sets we know are perfect. Document-heavy processing, but also in asset inspections. That’s one we’re using as well with cameras.

So using the various forms of AI to actually add and complement our existing systems, we’re not, we’re really augmenting, I think is probably the right phrase to use, we’re augmenting what we’re doing, in the hope that it will drive productivity improvement so that we don’t have to grow our headcount at the rate of our population, because we have a pretty rapid-growing population.

Looking beyond AI, what emerging technologies do you think will have the biggest impact on local government over the next 2–3 years?

Beyond AI, I think where we’re seeing a lot of benefits is really in the technologies that actually support what we’re currently doing. It’s where the organisation already has processes in place. What we’re seeing is that the price point for a lot of that technology is dropping quite significantly, and it’s allowing us to implement technologies a lot quicker than what we did previously. But also, if they’re not working, it’s really easy to drop them very quickly, and not enter into that pilot cycle that tends to go on forever.

So the pilot cycle is really nearly the implementation phase with us, and then if at the end of it we don’t like it, we will just drop it and move on.

I think for me, cameras are going to be very important going forward, and how they collect data. It’s going to be huge across local government.

To give you an example, we can cover our whole network now in three weeks using camera technology, whereas we’ve done that once a year previously. So what that does is it gives us really good data and we get a bit more proactive. I’m not saying we can fill in the potholes any quicker, but the reality is we’re aware of them, and when the public are actually ringing in, we’re telling them we’re aware of them.

But what it does allow us is to schedule our work a lot more efficiently. So we can actually zone off areas that have a lot more potholes, deeper potholes, et cetera. And I’m just using potholes as an example. It’s graffiti, roadside vegetation, those kind of things which the cameras are picking up.

What guardrails do you think councils need now and into the future, around things like privacy, security, transparency, and responsible use?

Look, I think one of the key things we have here is a trust framework. We’ve built a trust framework around AI, and it’s basically our commitment to the staff that if we don’t trust the information the AI tool has given us, we won’t use it. It is quite simple in a lot of cases for us.

So I think from our point of view, one of the guardrails is that the staff need to trust the application and need to trust the software.

Another guardrail is really around reality, because if we think the staff are not going home and using this technology, I think we’re living in a bubble. I think it’s quite clear staff are.

From our point of view, we’ve rolled out training to all the staff across council on AI, optional training, so it hasn’t been mandatory. It’s not towards any specific AI tool. It’s really how AI can be used in different ways. And that’s probably gained credibility and trust with the staff as well.

So I think the whole governance thing can be a little bit overdone, because really when people come into council they sign a document saying that it’s council information and they’re not going to misuse it. The actual processes are there, it’s just a matter of enforcing them in a different environment.

What opportunities are you most excited about, and what challenges or risks are you most focused on managing?

Yeah, I think the opportunities as I see them is, especially in a council like ours, the ability for the organisation to improve the service delivery without necessarily that huge cost increase that would have to happen.

So we’re not looking at AI replacing staff, far from that. We’re looking at AI augmenting what the staff already do and helping them do their jobs.

We have a situation where employees are quite stretched doing what they’re doing. We have a small team, and what we’re trying to do is put the tools in their hands that will help them do it more efficiently. And then as that efficiency curve begins to enhance, what it does is allow us to grow as an organisation as the population grows without necessarily increasing the headcount, and therefore the financial sustainability of council.

And one of my key roles as the CEO is to ensure financial sustainability has that knock-on effect. So it’s really going back to the primary reason as to why the CEO is here, really looking down that line and trying to align everything so that the financial sustainability, and the council can actually continue to deliver the services into the future.

For people attending Local Government Focus Day, what do you hope they take away, and what would you encourage them to do differently when they get back to the office?

Yeah, I think for me, AI is a bit like a candy store at the moment, in particular. There’s tools out there that’ll do everything for you if you listen to what people are telling you. But I think it’s really important that people, instead of asking “What AI tool should we use?”, actually ask some basic questions before they get to that point.

Probably three quick key questions for me are:

• What are people doing that perhaps a system or an AI tool could help them with?
  And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve gone out to our staff and asked them, “Look, what part of your job do you find frustrating?” And now we have a list of 50 problems. Now we will start going looking at AI tools with those problems in mind, as opposed to looking at the tools first off.

• Looking at the decision process in the organisation, why does the work slow down in certain areas? What’s the bottleneck, and why is that there? What can we do to speed up the decision-making and put the information that the staff need into their hands, as opposed to them having to continually go and check and countercheck and everything else?

• Where is judgement being wasted on admin?
  For me, a lot of those processes should be just very simple. If we put the knowledge in the workers’ hands, whether through AI tools or whatever it may be, it could be just workflow management. It’s not all AI.

But what AI can do is highlight where the inefficiencies are in the system, and then it could be very simple fixes, or it could be AI agents, or it really could be a redesign of what we’re doing to take advantage of what’s happening.

Hear Derek Madden speak live at Local Government Focus Day Victoria 2026. Join the panel “AI, Emerging Technologies, and Digital Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges” (11:00 AM – 11:30 AM) to explore practical council use cases, what’s enabling (and slowing) adoption, and how councils can manage risk while building capability and confidence. View the agenda and register to secure your place and be part of the conversation