What happens when you think with AI, not just about AI?
APS Capability Reinvestment Fund
In 2025, Dragonfly Thinking became the first homegrown GenAI system to be piloted by the Australian Public Service. The pilot was delivered in partnership with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), AI CoLab, and the APS Academy.
How did Dragonfly’s AI tools help?
Risk, Finance & Policy teams surfaced blind spots across agencies
Strategy teams developed no-regret actions in live scenarios
Digital divisions compressed weeks of research into days
Why did this pilot matter?
Policy teams are under pressure to make better decisions faster, with fewer resources and more uncertainty.
How Public Sector Teams Used Dragonfly AI to Think Smarter
Scenario Planning → Strategic Action
Dr Huw McKay used Dragonfly’ Scenarios and his own “Escher Prompt” to map four divergent futures and surface no-regret strategic moves for a multinational company. What normally takes weeks? Done in hours.
Supply Chain Security
Eric Nguyen used Dragonfly to develop a structured, high-impact strategy that multiplied the depth of research (x3) while reducing discovery time by 50–60%. More importantly, he changed the way he worked and thought.
Risk Foresight at Scale
Chloe Tallentire from the Department of Finance used Dragonfly to help build an AI-powered foresight platform to help small agencies surface hidden risks and scale Comcover support to 170+ members.
Blind Spot Detection in Policy
DISR coordinated three live pilots testing Dragonfly on complex challenges, from data centres to hypothetical technology bans. Dragonfly helped teams think outside the box and surface novel information and insights.
Energy Transition Pathways
Climate advisor James Balzer used Dragonfly’s Perspectives view to weigh SDG-aligned trade-offs for Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition bridging predictive modelling and prescriptive strategy.
Key Takeaways
Every team found the same thing, Dragonfly helped them think better and faster. To unlock the full potential of AI in government, we need a mindset shift: from automation to augmentation, from prompts to partnerships, from treating AI as a tool to treating it as a thinking partner.
Chloe Tallentire
Structured Innovation in the APS
As a risk advisor at the Department of Finance, Chloe Tallentire used Dragonfly's Risk, Reward, and Resilience (RRR) framework to co-design practical foresight tools through the AI CoLab.
“Dragonfly’s perspectives analysis lets small risk teams do what used to take much bigger ones—and prevents over-investing in outdated risks. Highly recommended.”
Eric Nguyen
Digital Strategist and Executive Committee Member of the Australian Computer Society
“Dragonfly expanded the depth of my research by at least 3× and cut discovery time from weeks to days (50–60% reduction).”
James Balzer
Just Energy Transitions
Climate and sustainability expert James Balzer applied Dragonfly Strategy to Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), creating robust strategies across divergent futures.
“Dragonfly Thinking helped me weigh short-, medium- and long-term trade-offs in Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP).”
From the AI CoLab to the World Government Summit
What if governments thought like dragonflies?
As part of the AI CoLab, Air Vice-Marshal (Retd) John Blackburn AO, former Deputy Chief of the Royal Australian Air Force, partnered with Dragonfly to create systemic risk maps for Australian national resilience.
This initiative surfaced critical interdependencies, from fuel and food security to digital infrastructure and sovereign supply chainsand identified strategic blind spots in national preparedness.
This AICoLab project was featured at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
“Integrating Dragonfly into our project team enabled us to gain a deeper understanding of systemic risks and vulnerabilities, and to identify creative strategies to strengthen national resilience.”
– Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO (Retd), Board Chair,
IIER-A
“Dragonfly is the kind of powerful tool we need to build into business as usual, that we need to help us make tough decisions in tough times. Simple experiments quickly showed Dragonfly’s value: a rapid analysis product on middle-income traps in two hours that would have previously taken us three days, for instance.”
— Bridi Rice, CEO, Development Intelligence Lab
Aid, Developement & For Purpose
At the 2024 Australasian Aid Conference, Development Intelligence Lab CEO Bridi Rice shared results from an experiment where Lab analysts with no particular expertise in development economics used Dragonfly AI to analyze middle-income traps in Southeast Asia under time pressure.
Pacific Leadership
Dragonfly Thinking partnered with the ANU Pacific Security College to enhance decision-making capabilities for Pacific security leaders, demonstrating how AI can augment strategic thinking while respecting local knowledge and context.
– ANU Pacific Security College, Solomon Islands Leadership Workshop
“What distinguishes Dragonfly Thinking from conventional AI tools is its cognitive architecture, which is layered over large language models like ChatGPT. Rather than simply generating responses, the system guides users through a process of structured analysis and incorporates multiple perspectives.”
–Development Policy Centre, ‘Putting AI in aid: new tools for development policy and programming’
Philanthropy and the
“For Purpose” Sector
Aaron McNeilly, a strategic philanthropy expert, adopted Dragonfly’s methods following the NEXUS Australia Summit.
“Dragonfly Thinking is a powerful collaboration tool for navigating complex social impact initiatives; it gives me the strategic clarity I need to drive real, lasting change and engage a diverse portfolio of stakeholders.”
— Aaron McNeilly, The Alchemists Global