Published on the 24/09/2025 | Written by Heather Wright
Opens up new business model…
When community services and aged care provider Uniting NSW.ACT embarked on its first generative AI use case it was looking to remove administrative burden for its 11,000+ employees. In the process it found a potential new business model, which has already sparked interest from multiple other aged care providers.
Andrew Dome, Uniting NSW.ACT chief digital information officer, says five other aged care providers have approached him about white labelling Buddy, the ‘digital front door for employees’ aiming to help them to ‘hold the hand, not the pen’.
“That’s a completely new business model that Uniting has never considered.”
“Our production version of Buddy has got to the stage now where I’ve got five other aged care providers in Australia who want us to whitelist it and offer it as a service,” Dome says. “That’s a completely new business model that Uniting has never considered.”
The interest reflects the success of Buddy as a digital front door, streamlining access to enterprise systems and dramatically reducing administrative burden for employees.
The organisation, which provides services from early learning services to senior services, has more than 145,000 customers and around 13,000 employees, including volunteers.
Each employee has a curated AI digital front door exposing the services and content needed for them to do their job.
“The thinking is that Vanessa does not need to know where the DayForce app is and go into the HR system. She doesn’t need to know where the ServiceNow app is and go into it, or know where the SharePoint Online link is. It’s all delivered via that digital front door.”
One of the standout features is Buddy’s voice-to-text capability for frontline workers. Previously workers visiting clients in home and community care settings had to drive to a Uniting site after their client visit, log into a computer, go into the clinical system and type up full notes, they can now leave the clients, sit in their car – ‘parked, not driving’, Dome notes – and record voice notes which are transcribed to text then and there.
It turns the task into a two minute activity, rather than the 15 to 20 minutes, plus driving time, that it used to take, returning 15 minutes back in the day, Dome says.
“Times that by 9,000 employees every day that are seeing five or six customers. What we are actually getting from out home and community care workers now returning between one and two hours back in their day enabling them to spend additional time with our customers – which is the goal: Spending more time in quality care with our customers.”
The app provides multi-language support, enabling workers to speak in their own language – 20 percent of Uniting’s aged care workforce are of Nepali origin – which is then converted into English and added to the clinical system in English for the next care worker.
The app tiles, which are persona-based, surfacing content relevant to the specific user, can also be shown in the language of choice.
A low-risk start
Dome says Buddy’s first use case was around policies and procedures, providing AI-driven smart search for quick access to the information. It’s an area he recommends other companies yet to begin their genAI journey consider starting with, saying it’s a low risk use case where the data is a known quantity. The data was internal, non-sensitive and available on the organisation’s intranet – but hard to find.
A ChatGPT type experience, dubbed Uchat, allowed employees to ask natural language questions and receive near instant answers. It quickly showed a difference between what the IT team thought people would ask and what they really were asking.
“When we were testing the IT people were asking questions like ‘what’s my leave entitlement’. And they would get that information back in milliseconds. Whereas the aged care people were asking questions that were completely different and we would never have thought about.”
Case in point: The day a local area coordinator hit a kangaroo with her car. She rang her supervisor to ask what to do. The supervisor was on the Buddy pilot. It provided a six step process around ensuring safety.
“She dealt with that in about 30 minutes, did everything she needed to and moved on. Without Buddy, she would have spent probably half a day, if not a full day, working through speaking to HR and all of the other back-end enabling functions.”
Involve your board
Behind the scenes, Dome says Uniting has invested heavily in governance, security and ethical AI use.
“You can have the coolest AI tool out there that does all this amazing stuff, but if you don’t have your security controls and governance in place it can be a complete disaster,” he warns.
Uniting’s board was involved early. Discovery for the work began in January 2024. Executive buy-in was in February.
“Don’t create a proof of concept, with six months’ worth of work and go to your executives and board and say this is this cool thing we’ve done, where they’ve had no visibility, no input in. Get them involved in that discussion and direction very early in the piece.”
He noted too, that as board members become more comfortable with AI, the goal posts are moving and scenarios they voted down just months ago are now becoming acceptable. In Uniting’s case, an idea to enable AI to create a care plan for a customer received short shrift from the board 12 months ago.
“Last week we presented Buddy again to our board… We used the same use case and guess what? Their position had changed. And the reason it has changed it 12 months on, those board members know much more around AI. They’re using it in their daily lives, they now know the value and benefits of AI which they probably didn’t have great insight into last year.
“So the goal posts have moved and there is more willingness to do things.”
For those embarking on their AI journey, Dome has some straightforward advice: “Start with that really easy use case – policies and procedures is an easy one. A lot of organisations start with that because it’s a business problem and it can be solved. It’s low risk.
“Take it to your board. Get their buy-in early. They want to be involved in these conversations.”
Leverage board member’s expertise with AI where you can – most will be sitting on other boards and may be able to share learnings from those organisations as well.
“They are having the same conversations about responsible and ethical AI use at those other organisations. Get them to input into the conversation.”
Focus too, on responsible and ethical AI use, presenting AI guidelines and policies and showing an organisational change plan for employees, and ensure the appropriate security controls.
With Buddy now attracting external interest, Uniting is exploring how to support other organisations, especially for smaller organisations unable to make the investment to build such a platform themselves.
Says Dome: “We’re absolutely up for it.”
