Queensland TMR senior leaders driving AI

Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads’ most senior leadership is playing a bigger part in its technology decisions, driving appetite for more AI adoption across the organisation.

Speaking at an SAP customer event in Sydney, TMR’s deputy chief financial offer and digital transformation lead Paul Hesford said the department had a full pipeline of AI projects headed for production with backing from its most senior public servant, director general Sally Stannard.

“Sally Stannard, our director general, has moved the IT function closer to the centre [of the department]," Hesford said.

“She wants to modernise the way we do our work. She puts out in her messages what she's using Copilot for, and so it is being definitely leader-led."

Hesford named his direct report, TMR’s chief financial officer Nick Shaw, as another senior leader driving the cultural shift across the department to support AI adoption.

“He's been at me for over three years [asking], ‘When am I getting AI?’,” Hesford said.

“Really culture is critical around working with the business, the leaders and giving the staff the confidence to leverage the technology,” he added.

TMR already uses Microsoft’s Copilot widely to help manage the organisation’s $10 billion budget including submissions to ministers, and preparing content for case studies and annual reports.

It also used Copilot to write the ethical assessment for the adoption of SAP’s platform, according to Hesford.

TMR is in the process of transitioning to SAP S4/HANA, which has more native AI capability and, to condition its data, is using SAP-certified extension Syniti to make recommendations, with 200 generated to date.

The department wants to have 15 AI projects live by Christmas with plans for 15 more after that.

Resume ranking

An emerging use case for AI is to collate and rank resumes, according to Hesford.

“We've just gone live with resume ranking," he said.

"[There’s] a lot of ethical considerations in how you rank resumes. And there was a bit of pushback from the business, but very much focused around human-controlled AI."

Hesford said that he was introduced to the concept of “human-controlled AI” through work with the University of Queensland, and that he’d come to prefer it over “human in the loop”.

“[The university] introduced me to the concept of human-controlled AI and [I thought] that makes a lot more sense, and you can actually see it, especially in a state government organisation where we tend to be quite risk-averse.

"Talking about human-controlled AI puts the power back in the public servant or the individual to make the decision,” he said.