Most councils did not set out to adopt AI. It arrived anyway, accessible on browsers or peoples’ mobiles, folded into Microsoft 365 through Copilot suggestions, smart replies in Teams, and a dozen smaller features that got switched on somewhere along the way. Nobody ran a formal rollout. It just became part of how the tools work.
That is not a criticism. It is how most organisations end up here, councils included. But it does raise a fair question: if someone asked which AI features are active across your systems, and who is responsible for how they are used, would that be an easy answer or a scramble?
For many councils, it can often be the latter. Not because anyone has been careless, but because content has spread across Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and legacy file shares faster than governance has kept up with. Structure gets added later, if at all.
The State Records Act doesn’t care how the content got there
This is where the pressure is real, with or without a mandate. Councils already have obligations under the State Records Act to properly manage, retain and dispose of records. Those obligations do not distinguish how content is generated. If it's a record, it's in scope.
The same goes for privacy. Ratepayers and residents expect their information to be handled with care, regardless of which system last handled it. An AI service that quietly engages with sensitive content is not exempt from that expectation just because it was not part of a formal project.
The New South Wales Government has just put a number on this concern at the state level. Its new AI Operational Policy requires agencies to register AI use cases, appoint an accountable official, and demonstrate (on demand) how AI is governed across their systems.
It is a mandatory framework for state agencies at this point in time. But it's a useful marker of where expectations are heading, and it precisely names the gap many councils already have. Few have mapped what AI is doing across their environment and assigned ownership of it.
Another flag of public sector intent is the announcement by the South Australian government in establishing a Royal Commission into Artificial Intelligence to ensure the state maximises benefits and minimises unwanted impacts from the AI boom.
Getting ahead of this is easier than catching up to it
Closing this gap does not require a new platform or months of disruption. Most councils already run Microsoft 365 and have access to compliance and data governance tools in the Microsoft Purview Suite. Governance just needs to be built into it properly, rather than left to people making decisions as they go.
That’s the gap iWorkplace for Microsoft 365 closes. It brings automated governance, classification, and compliance natively into Microsoft 365, the environment your teams are already working in. Rather than adding another system for them to work with (or workaround), iWorkplace ensures data governance and compliance by default, all tied neatly into DLP policies and AI Data Security Posture Management.
For councils, that looks like:
- Automated records governance aligned to the State Records Act, applied consistently across Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive rather than relying on manual classification.
- AI-powered auto-classification that tags and protects content based on what it actually is, turning years of unstructured content into something searchable, trustworthy and genuinely AI-ready.
- Real-time audit trails and defensible disposal, so if an auditor or a curious councillor asks how information is managed and who's accountable, the answer is already documented rather than assembled under pressure.
- Protection against the use of sensitive information in unauthorised AI tools or workspaces.
- Governed, self-service collaboration, so staff can keep creating Teams sites and SharePoint spaces at the pace council work demands, without each one becoming an ungoverned pocket of risk.
None of this depends on a mandate arriving first. It's simply putting proper structure around the tools your council is already using every day, so that when someone asks the question, the answer is ready.
If you are not sure where your council stands right now, Professional Advantage offers a commitment-free consultation to talk it through. Book your consultation here.
