Owned by: Chief AI Officer
Foundational AI training
Mandatory foundational AI training for all staff, differentiated by what each role actually does with AI.
What is required
Foundational AI training is mandatory for all staff across the APS, establishing a consistent baseline of understanding of responsible AI use.
Remaining requirements under the policy commence December 2026.
Why this is harder than it looks
A single all-staff module satisfies the letter of the requirement and changes very little. The people who create risk — those procuring AI, those building it, and those relying on its output for decisions — need materially different training from everyone else, and generic vendor courses do not reference your policy environment.
What you get
Artefacts, not activity. Each engagement is fixed in scope and leaves your team able to repeat the work without us.
- A foundational module for all staff, grounded in your agency's own AI policy position rather than generic AI literacy
- Role-differentiated streams for executives and decision-makers, practitioners and technical staff, and procurement and contract owners
- Completion tracking and evidence suitable for reporting against the requirement
- Materials your learning team owns and can re-run, not a dependency on us
- Content aligned to the National AI Centre's essential practices for responsible AI use
The other obligations
AI use-case register
Find every in-scope AI use across the agency and record it, with an accountable officer against each one.
AI impact assessments
Assess each in-scope use case before deployment, against the DTA tool and Australia's AI Ethics Principles.
AI technical standard conformance
Evidence the Evaluate and Monitor phases of the AI technical standard — including adversarial testing.
A procurement pathway that already exists
Commonwealth agencies do not need to run a tender or find us on a panel to work with us. The rules already provide a direct route for engaging an Australian SME, and the facts your procurement delegate needs are set out below.
We meet the CPRs definition of an SME
Comware is an Australian business (ABN 69 054 484 347) based in Melbourne. The Commonwealth Procurement Rules define an SME as an Australian or New Zealand business with fewer than 200 full-time equivalent employees, counted across associated entities. We qualify.
You can engage us directly under Exemption 17
Appendix A, Exemption 17 of the Commonwealth Procurement Rules lets an entity directly engage an SME for procurements valued below $500,000 including GST, provided value for money can be demonstrated. No open approach to market is required, and no panel membership is needed.
We contract on the Commonwealth Contracting Suite
Use of the Commonwealth Contracting Suite is mandated for procurements under $200,000. We work to it as standard, which keeps the contracting overhead proportionate to engagements of this size.
Scoped to close before the deadline, not after it
Engagements are fixed in scope and sequenced so the artefacts your Accountable Official needs exist before the requirement bites — rather than a programme that is still running when the date passes.
Before applying Exemption 17: where the Indigenous Procurement Policy’s Mandatory Set Aside applies — procurements delivered in remote Australia, and other procurements wholly delivered in Australia valued between $80,000 and $200,000 including GST — an Indigenous business must first be given the opportunity to demonstrate value for money.
This page describes the procurement rules as published by the Department of Finance and is provided as a convenience, not as procurement advice. Your delegate remains responsible for the procurement decision and for demonstrating value for money.