Australia’s Robodebt scandal left a scar on public trust in government automation. The scheme used a flawed algorithm to issue hundreds of thousands of unlawful debt notices to welfare recipients, leading to a $1.8 billion settlement and a Royal Commission that called it “a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms.” For government technology leaders across the country, the message was unambiguous: automation without governance is a liability.
Joshua Pope, CTO of the Fair Work Commission (FWC), watched that fallout with clear eyes. He understood what AI could do for a tribunal that serves millions of Australians navigating workplace disputes. He understood the stakes of getting it wrong just as well.
“Governance is really hard,” Josh says. “There was a very public bad experience with AI making choices on behalf of people, without a human in the loop. So for us, the ability to check, validate, and verify at every step was non-negotiable.”
Service Delivery Locked Behind Business Hours
The Fair Work Commission plays an important role in Australia’s public service, resolving workplace disputes, setting minimum wages, and adjudicating unfair dismissal claims. Josh estimates that a significant number of the people reaching the Commission could be served with information collected through an agentic approach, rather than waiting for a human to respond between nine and five on the eastern seaboard.
The obstacle was not ambition. It was the wall of mandatory compliance requirements standing between a government agency and any new technology deployment – from IRAP certification and data sovereignty rules to legal frameworks for automated decision-making that the Robodebt Royal Commission had placed under a national microscope.
Josh needed a platform that met the Australian government’s strict security and data sovereignty requirements and gave a small technology team the agility to build AI solutions and push them into production at pace.
“Nothing is insurmountable,” Josh says. “Everything can be solved through tenacity or technology.”
The Solution: Compliant, Fast, Reusable
What separated FWC’s approach from the typical government procurement cycle was preparation. Before the contract was signed, Josh made platform training mandatory for his team. No sales pitches. No product overviews. Just hands-on instruction on how to build.
“I specifically said I don’t want to see a single sales pitch as part of the onboarding week,” Josh recalls. “Just show me how to build stuff.”
The result was a procurement-to-production timeline that defies government norms. FWC moved from signed paperwork to onboarding within a single week. The team attempted to build and deploy their first Workato AI agent (i.e. Genie) on day one.
A custom IT Support Genie and License Optimisation Genie are now live internally, giving the Commission’s technology group a governed, repeatable process for deploying AI agents. Each solution sits within the compliance guardrails that post-Robodebt Australia demands, with explainability baked into every step.
Josh’s ambition reaches beyond his own agency. Every use case FWC builds is designed as a reusable template for other government bodies.
“Build once, reuse infinitely,” Josh says. “That’s the idea.”
Redefining What Speed Looks Like in Government
FWC’s approach aligns directly with the AI Plan for the Australian Public Service 2025 (i.e. APS AI plan). This is the Australian government’s mandate for every public servant to have access to generative AI tools, supported by proper governance and training. While the plan sets an 18-month implementation horizon, FWC is already live.
FWC’s Infrastructure Manager, Kris Deep, leads the operational deployment of these agents. His focus is the use cases that deliver tangible value for his ICT team and the people they support. Their IT Support Genie is the centrepiece, customised with over 30 distinct skills.
Keeping 59 Hearing Rooms Running
FWC supports around 59 hearing rooms across the country, equipped with virtual conferencing and in-person meeting capabilities used by judges, lawyers, paralegals, applicants, and respondents. With an average of 50 hearings each day occurring in every state and territory across Australia, every one of 59 purpose-built hearing rooms must be operational. A single room going down can delay a case that someone has been waiting to have heard.
Status checks previously required Kris’s ICT team to log into four separate portals and manually review device statuses. The process was time-consuming, prone to human error, and only feasible once a day. If a hearing room went down mid-morning, the team often found out from frustrated users rather than from their own monitoring.
Now, with the IT Support Genie, the team runs virtual conferencing checks multiple times daily across all systems in a single pass. The report flags devices with issues, affected rooms, polling health, unhealthy devices, and domain status.
The IT Support Genie handles a range of other workflows: provisioning overseas conditional access in five minutes (down from 30 minutes), streamlining staff onboarding and offboarding (saving 30 minutes to an hour per instance), and helping users troubleshoot connectivity issues by locating competing device connections on their server, all without needing the ICT team to intervene manually.
From an Hour to Two Minutes: 30x Faster Case Report Generation
The Commission’s newest agent was built within a single week. Associates preparing investigation reports previously spent at least an hour each time, manually retrieving case information from a clunky web interface and Dynamics. This process now runs through Workato, with the agent pulling data directly from multiple sources to generate a master report within two minutes. This synthesises case notes from the applicant and respondent, often spanning over 30 files that previously had to be downloaded individually.
In a tribunal where people come seeking resolution on unfair dismissal, wage disputes, and workplace safety, every day shaved from an administrative process is a day closer to justice for the people who need it most.
The Productivity Trap
Josh’s approach to productivity carries a lesson that most AI deployments overlook. He reminds us that freeing up capacity is only half the equation. The other half is knowing exactly where that capacity should go next.
The difference is intent. Automation without direction just redistributes inefficiency, whereas Josh treats recovered hours the way a Chief Financial Officer treats recovered budget: already allocated before it lands.
From Proving Ground Internally to Public-Facing AI
The Commission is preparing to extend its agentic capabilities to public-facing services. A contact centre agent is already in development. Josh expected pushback from the teams involved. The reaction surprised him.
Josh is a design partner for Workato’s Data Genie, providing real-world government input into the product’s development before general availability. His forward view is shaped by a principle he returns to repeatedly: government agencies should solve problems six to twelve months ahead, not react to issues that crystallized two years ago.
His advice to other government technology leaders considering AI is practical.
“Find what you can reuse first,” Josh says. “Don’t get stuck researching where your internal ROI is and commissioning a bespoke solution every time. Research on where you can pick something up and just configure it for your use case.”
For an institution that navigated COVID-19 without accumulating the multi-year backlogs plaguing other courts and tribunals, speed through preparation is nothing new. What has changed is a reliable technology infrastructure that makes speed possible at scale.
For a deeper look at what separates AI visibility from real governance, read this whitepaper: The Control Tower Fallacy: Visibility Is Not Governance.