AI in Australia’s healthcare sector: Real-world insights from our Executive Experts event

AI is reshaping industries across Australia, and healthcare is no exception. Providing opportunities to enhance care, streamline operations, and aid decision-making, leaders within the sector are focused on how to move from AI ideas to real impact.

That was the topic of our recent Executive Experts event in Sydney, bringing together 20 leaders from across the sector for a breakfast roundtable discussion on AI in healthcare. Our guest speakers included Christina Igasto (Chief Digital Officer, Service NSW and former Chief Digital Health Officer, Western Sydney Local Health District) and Paul Gladigau (Former CTO, Equifax and CIO, Commonwealth Bank).

With a diverse group of digital leaders, a stunning view of Darling Harbour and a marvellous breakfast, the event moved beyond the usual AI talking points to explore real-world examples of how AI is reshaping patient care and healthcare operations, as well as the unique challenges the sector is facing.

Building trust through transparent, hands-on AI governance

During the breakfast roundtable, trust with AI came up again and again, not as a barrier, but as an enabler. Leaders highlighted several key factors for success:

• A commitment to protecting customer and patient knowledge and keeping health needs at the centre of AI initiatives.
• Regulatory expectations, clinical safety and a strong complaints environment shape AI decisions.
• Engage stakeholders early and often, using an agile mindset to help keep everyone involved.
• Document decisions, test thoroughly, confirm and reconfirm during the adoption process.
• Clinicians and data scientists need to collaborate closely, especially for vital-sign, workflow, and safety-related AI.
• The “two speeds” approach: internal readiness and regulator readiness. Both matter.
• Align to broader industry strategies, with a specific example discussed on how New Zealand’s new digital health strategy is helping align AI work.

Practical ways to guide organisations through the next wave of AI innovation

After decades of diagnostic and learning improvements, healthcare is now entering a phase where AI needs to be embedded, not just experimented with.

A few standout insights from the discussion included:

• AI initiatives can often start as a solution in search of a problem. Organisations need to identify the problem first, then assess whether AI is the right approach, and break big problems into manageable chunks.
• Use innovation hubs for Proof of Concepts, but start with the problem, not the tech.
• Avoid racing to the latest tool before examining the process – this is where AI projects often fail.
• Co-design AI with clinicians. If it adds clicks to their day-to-day workload, it’s already failed.
• Focus early on administrative and support work, such as optimising documentation and scheduling to free up staff time.
• Waiting for AI to “stabilise” is tempting but risky, and you can quickly end up playing catch-up.

How CIOs and clinical leaders are keeping AI both lean and safe

Across the sector, we’re seeing a common playbook emerge to manage the pipeline and be cost-effective. Key approaches to keep things tight included:

• Govern first:  Start with safety, privacy and fairness guardrails before the build.
• Start small: Create Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) with one hypothesis and clear metrics.
• Integrate into real workflows: Don’t bolt AI on; build it into the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and daily work.
• Prioritise low-regret use cases: Focus on scheduling, documentation, coding suggestions, or triage support can help limit the blast radius of AI.
• Keep costs under control: Maintain firm oversight on costs across cloud scaling, shared assets, vendor partnerships and outcome-based contracts.

AI is becoming an important tool in the healthcare kitbag, but it is also one that can continually learn, adapt and rapidly evolve. With that comes new risks that need to be understood and mitigated against.

To scale safely and quickly, leaders also shared practical lessons such as:

• Using small, cross-functional squads (2–6 people) with clinicians embedded.
• Building a lightweight AI Centre of Excellence to provide standards, templates, guardrails and reusable components.
• Upskilling selectively with clinicians learning AI fundamentals and engineers on Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), bringing in specialists when needed.
• Designing cloud-first, modular, replaceable components.
• Reusing templates, connectors, evaluation scripts and UI elements so every pilot becomes a future product.
• Collaborating across organisations or leaning on vendors with outcome-based contracts, when it makes sense to do so.

AI by design on the healthcare agenda

What was clear from the event discussion is that AI by Design and taking a strategic, intentional approach is firmly on every healthcare organisation’s agenda. Yet it’s the new approaches to AI governance, software engineering, and delivery that will separate real impact from hype – especially in healthcare, where trust, safety and human judgement remain non-negotiable. Thank you to everyone who came to the event and shared their valuable insights.

Drawing on these insights, the Equal Experts Australia team will be exploring “AI by Design in Healthcare” further, including through a detailed research piece on the specific approaches and techniques surrounding AI roles, operating models, compliance, security, data management, tools, lifecycle and monitoring.

If you’re shaping your organisation’s healthcare AI and want to contribute to research on how the sector is evolving, we’d welcome your insights. Contact the team and we’ll reach out for a short 15-30 minute call to hear your insights and ensure you receive a copy of the completed research in early 2026.

About the author

Ken Gallacher is a commercially savvy, delivery-focused digital executive with over 30 years’ experience leading high-impact transformations, both as a CIO and as a Partner at Big4 consulting firms. Ken brings a wide range of industry experience across healthcare, financial services, government, media, education, manufacturing and retail sectors. Connect with Ken on LinkedIn.