Hi Smart Community friends,
In this episode of The Smart Community Podcast, we continue our Future Of series, this time looking at the future of artificial intelligence in local government. I speak with Josh Bearup, Emerging Technologies Officer at Mornington Peninsula Shire in Victoria.
Josh shares his non-traditional pathway into technology, from working in a laundromat to completing a cybersecurity qualification and joining the Victorian Government through a cybersecurity internship. We then explore how AI could change the way local government operates, including Josh’s view on how it can shift humans away from simply executing processes and towards defining, improving and taking accountability for them.
A big part of our conversation focuses on governance and the importance of making organisational processes more explicit. Josh shares how mapping processes, documenting relationships between people, systems and procedures, and building stronger organisational knowledge can create a better foundation for using AI responsibly.
We also discuss why governance can no longer just sit in policies and documents. As AI takes on more work, councils need clear processes, defined decision points and strong human accountability around how the work is actually done. Josh shares practical examples from Mornington Peninsula Shire, and we finish by talking about how councils can start experimenting with AI in ways that are useful, scalable and responsible.
As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.
What we cover in this episode:
- Josh’s non-traditional pathway: from McDonald’s, to a laundromat, to a Cert IV in cybersecurity, to a Victorian Government internship
- Why willingness to learn matters more than arriving “pre-packaged” with the right skills
- How AI could shift humans from executing processes to defining, improving and being accountable for them
- Using a RACI-style lens to separate human accountability from AI execution
- Real AI use cases at Mornington Peninsula Shire, from a resident-facing website assistant to an automated entry-screening tool for a short story competition
- Why mapping an organisation’s “ontology” – the relationships between people, processes and systems – is foundational to using AI well
- Token costs, and why solving a problem once and turning it into a reusable, documented process matters at scale
- Why governance needs to be explicit and executable, not just written policy
- Data governance versus process governance and why context and structure matter more than raw data
- The risks of AI being manipulated through natural language
- Practical first steps for council staff who want to start experimenting with AI safely
Quote options:
“I realised there’s no stop time where you can’t make a decision that changes kind of the trajectory or what your interests are and where your career goes.”
“Because the one thing that can’t be computed, no matter how good AI gets, is the justification of that process itself.”
“Doesn’t matter how good these tools are, if you can’t stand across what they’ve been doing, then there’s no point doing it in the first place, because no one can be accountable for what it’s done or be able to justify it.”
“If you ask Claude for a 1,000-page document, it will create a 1,000-page document. When content becomes cheap, the context and schema around it is what’s important.”
“All these processes need to become explicit. AI is patient, so when you have requirements on the way processes need to be done and the documentation that’s required, and you make those processes defined and structured and tailored to the way that you need them to be, they’ll do it. They’ll follow those instructions.”
Links:
Connect:
Connect with Josh via LinkedIn and learn more about his work at Mornington Peninsula Shire.
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or YouTube.
The Smart Community Podcast is produced by PERK Digital.
