City of Canning: 15 AI Use Cases, a Shared Language, and a Leadership Team Ready to Act

Brief

We designed and delivered a tailored AI for Leaders workshop for the City of Canning’s senior team. The session covered AI capabilities in plain language, addressed risk and governance head on, and included structured use case mapping that produced around 15 concrete AI opportunities across the organisation. Leaders left with a common language, a prioritised starting point, and the confidence to progress AI conversations with their teams and external vendors.

Problem

Local government sits in a genuinely complex position when it comes to AI adoption. The pressure to modernise is real, community expectations around service delivery are shifting, and the efficiency case for AI is hard to ignore. But councils also carry significant responsibilities around data privacy, community trust, accountability, and risk management that make “just start experimenting” an insufficient answer. The City of Canning’s leadership had strong interest in AI but no shared, practical understanding of what modern AI capabilities actually looked like, how they applied to a council environment, or how to evaluate opportunities responsibly. They needed more than a technology briefing. They needed a structured way to build shared understanding and translate it directly into their own context.

Solution

We designed and delivered an in-person AI for Leaders workshop built specifically around the City of Canning’s operating environment and priorities. The session covered modern AI capabilities, Large Language Models, Generative AI, AI agents, and computer vision, explained in clear, non-technical language with practical local government examples across customer service, asset management, compliance, and internal operations. We addressed risk, ethics, and governance directly: how to think about data, privacy, accountability, and vendor engagement in a public-sector context where community trust is non-negotiable. The second half of the session was structured use case mapping. Working with the leadership team, we facilitated guided ideation activities that translated AI concepts into concrete opportunities relevant to City of Canning’s actual processes and challenges, developing around 15 use cases spanning AI agents and phone call assistants, report automation, chatbots, computer vision applications, and avatar-based services.

• Built for local government: every example, every governance discussion, and every use case was grounded in the realities of running a council, not a generic corporate AI narrative
• Governance addressed directly: risk, privacy, accountability, and vendor engagement weren’t treated as footnotes, they were central to the session
• Use cases came from the room: ideas were generated by the people who understand the organisation, shaped through facilitated activities, not handed down as a generic list
• Practical over theoretical: leaders left with a concrete starting point and a common language, not just a broader appreciation of AI’s potential

Result

By the end of the session, City of Canning’s leadership team had a shared, realistic understanding of AI calibrated to the responsibilities and constraints of local government. The ~15 use cases produced during the workshop gave them a concrete, prioritised starting point, linked to real processes and challenges inside the organisation rather than abstract possibilities. Leaders came away with greater confidence to progress AI conversations with internal teams and external vendors, a practical foundation for an AI roadmap, and clarity on which ideas were ready to experiment with now versus which warranted longer-term planning.

Under the Hood