AI advisory services in Australia
Senior help for your leadership team on a monthly retainer. We sit in on the vendor calls, review the builds and write the board papers. When something is worth building, we build it.
What is AI advisory?
We are not the advisory firm that leaves you with an expensive PowerPoint. We sit with your business, get our hands dirty and implement the change. By the time we leave you have your ROI.
AI advisory is ongoing senior help for a leadership team making decisions about AI. It covers which opportunities to pursue, which vendors to trust, how to govern the risk and how to judge a build when it lands. It runs as a monthly retainer with a three month minimum. The people who advise you are the people who build.
When you want a whole project run from start to finish, that is AI consulting. Many clients do both, and the full list of engagements is under services.
Why do Australian businesses need one now?
Because adoption is running ahead of governance, and the law is about to catch up. Around 12 percent of Australian businesses used AI in their workplace in 2024-25, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics release of June 2026. Among medium-sized businesses it was 22 percent. Three years earlier it was 3 percent. The National AI Centre tracker, which surveys 400 small and mid-sized businesses a month, put adoption at 44 percent in February 2026.
Governance has not kept pace. ASIC reviewed 23 licensees in October 2024 and found governance arrangements lagging AI use at some of them, with a warning that the gap will widen as adoption increases. That review was of financial services firms. The pattern is the same in a builder or a wholesaler with two pilots and no owner.
From 10 December 2026, a business that uses personal information in automated decisions affecting a person's rights or interests must say so in its privacy policy, under the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024, according to the OAIC. Its October 2024 guidance already asks a business buying an off the shelf AI product to check what it was tested for, where the personal information goes and who can see it.
What does the board have to sign off?
A written AI position, a governance model and the risk register that goes with them. The AICD and the UTS Human Technology Institute published version 2 of A Director's Guide to AI Governance in June 2026. It reports that 90 percent of surveyed organisations are using or planning to use AI, up from 64 percent in 2022.
The Guidance for AI Adoption, published by the National AI Centre in October 2025 under the National AI Plan, sets out six essential practices for governing AI. It replaced the ten guardrails of the 2024 Voluntary AI Safety Standard. We write the board paper to those six practices.
The policy itself runs to two pages. What data can go where, who approves a workflow that touches customers or money, what gets logged, and who reviews the output each month. The strategy engagement produces it when there is no advisory retainer in place.
The retainer
Board papers
A written AI position, the risks named and a governance model your directors can approve, written to the six practices in the Guidance for AI Adoption.
Vendor calls
We sit in on demos and pricing. You get a written view on each vendor, including which claims we could not verify.
Build reviews
Whoever builds it, we review it against the plan. The data it depends on, the human review points and the rollback path.
Hiring
Whether to hire, what the role is and a second opinion on the shortlist. Most businesses under 500 staff do not need a Chief AI Officer.
Data and process fixes
Some of what looks like an AI problem is a missing owner or a spreadsheet nobody maintains. We help fix those too.
The decision log
What was decided and why. The log is written by us and owned by you.
Should you hire a Chief AI Officer instead?
Most businesses under 500 staff do not need one. A Chief AI Officer package in Australia runs from about $320,000 to $480,000, and a Head of AI from $250,000 to $350,000, according to the recruiter AI Talent On Demand in April 2026. The work a business of your size has for that person is a day or two a month, which is the retainer.
The hire makes sense once there are three or four agents in production and someone has to own them every day. We help you write that role when it arrives, and sit on the panel. The trade-offs are in AI consultant or in-house hire.
What does advisory lead to?
Advisory is where most clients start with us. The retainer finds the job worth automating, then the build follows as a scoped engagement with its own price. Your accounting system stays where it is. The same person approves what they approve today.
The Sydney construction business on Procore is what a build looks like when it lands. About 10,000 job PDFs made askable on a private server they rent, with every answer citing its source, and estimates drafted over WhatsApp from their cost book in minutes.
How does the retainer run?
A 30 minute call first. We talk through what the board is asking, what is already under way and what a good year looks like. Then a fixed monthly retainer, quoted before it starts, with a three month minimum.
The first month usually goes to the pilots already under way. Each one is reviewed for the data it depends on, the owner it lacks and whether it will hold up in production. Most businesses we meet have two or three, and one of them is worth keeping. The second month is the board paper. By the third, the decision log has enough in it that a new executive can read what was decided and why.
Each month has a set of leadership sessions, in person in ten Australian cities, plus calls as decisions come up. Vendor calls are the thing clients use us for most, and how we evaluate a vendor is written up as a guide. How the retainer fits with the other engagement models is on the approach page.
Cities
We work with clients in the rest of Australia over calls. Project work by city is under AI consulting.
Questions
What is AI advisory?
AI advisory is ongoing senior help for a leadership team making decisions about AI: which opportunities to pursue, which vendors to trust, how to govern the risk and how to judge a build. At Zinto it runs as a monthly retainer with a three month minimum, and the same people advise and build.
What is the difference between AI advisory and AI consulting?
Consulting is a project we run from start to finish, with discovery, a roadmap and a build. Advisory is the standing relationship around those decisions, a day or two a month. Most clients start with advisory, find the job worth automating and add the build as a scoped engagement.
How much does AI advisory cost?
A fixed monthly retainer with a three month minimum, quoted after a 30 minute call once we know the size of the leadership team and how often decisions come up. A typical month is a day to two days of our time. A build is priced separately, with its own scope.
Are you independent of the vendors?
Yes. We take no referral fees or commissions from any product we recommend. When we sit in on a vendor call you get a written view on each product, including the claims we could not verify. If buying beats building for your case, we say so and help you buy it.
Who is AI advisory for?
A CEO, CFO or COO of a business with 50 to 500 staff who has to answer the board on AI and does not want to hire for it. Construction, trades, logistics, manufacturing and wholesale are where most of our clients sit, and the retainer is shaped to those industries.
Which cities do you cover?
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Gold Coast, Canberra, Newcastle, Hobart and Darwin in person for board and leadership sessions. We work with clients in the rest of Australia over calls and shared documents, and the retainer runs the same way between visits wherever you are.
Next step
Thirty minutes on what the board is asking and what is already under way. We tell you whether a retainer is the right shape and what it would cost.