Jamie Ramage | Regional business AI

I build AI systems that run Australian businesses. Not chatbots. Not hype. Real workflows that cut admin, find leads, and do the work nobody has time for. Based in Wangaratta. Working with SMEs across AU and NZ. Founder of RD Creative Studio.

The shed has a new machine. The ute has the old routine. A year on, the tool runs one report a month and the whiteboard still runs the business. Systems don't fail. Adoption does. Who in your crew never logged in?

Every quote has a second half. The first gets written, priced, sent. The second gets left in the folder because ringing back feels like begging. The job was never lost. It was left. A follow-up isn't chasing. It's finishing the job you started.

The best tradie in town lost the job before he quoted. Not on price. In the gap between the ring and the reply. The work was never the problem. The gap was. Every system I build starts there now. What fills the gap in yours?

Best plumber on the range lost $18k because two rivals rang back in ten minutes and he took hours. Now a message goes out the second a call lands: "I'll ring you within the hour." Same hands, same work. He just stopped losing races he couldn't see.

An electrician wrote down how he quotes every job. Three weekends. One notebook. Now his apprentice quotes small jobs on her own, and the machine reads the same pages. Forty years in his head. Now it works when he's not there.

A client asked us to automate their ordering. We talked them out of it. Their volume was too low for automation to pay. They needed a rule: reorder at X, not before. Ten minutes to write down. Cost us the job. Kept the client.

Every system I built still queued at my door. The machine did the work - it just couldn't decide anything. So I wrote my decisions down before they were needed. One page. It says yes on its own now. The queue was never work. It was every decision I never wrote down.

Yesterday a machine caught one of our claims out. A connection we'd have sworn was live had died. No alarm, no bill, no client call. So we built the obvious thing: a program that re-tests our claims each morning. Working: silence. Broken: a plain message, before breakfast.

The accountant's letter sat in the ute all week: the tax bill is on a payment plan, the interest is running, and the interest no longer counts. Since 1 July the ATO's interest charge is no deduction. Around 11 per cent, compounding daily. Waiting now costs what the notice says.

On 10 December, privacy law changes: if your software makes decisions about people, your policy has to say so. Not just AI. Any scoring tool, any screener. Writing it down takes a morning. Finding how many decisions your software already makes that nobody wrote down takes longer.

A creditor called while the yards were still going: New-season lambs are starting to move. The payment list did not take the week off. The owner would not let a tool touch it until every line had been read. I used to treat that pause as the problem. This week I learned it is the standard. 65% of businesses who haven't adopted AI want a human in control. That is from the National AI Capability Plan insights, 2026. Regional agribusiness is not short of software. Xero and MYOB already put the agent in it. Out here, nothing spends until the owner says yes. That approval step is what gets the tool used on a Friday, when the owner is still in the yards. A payment run that cannot wait for that yes does not belong in a Wangaratta business. If your software offered to pay that creditor tonight, would you send it, or would you still read every line?

Where does a George Town cafe find $50,000? Northern Tasmania. The water authority wrote to the building owners: fit a grease trap, or the place is non-compliant. The lease says she can't alter the building. The landlord won't take the work. She's talking to lawyers about court. She can't see where $50,000 comes from, and she says they can close her. Tasmania passed a retail leases law four years ago to keep a fight like this out of court. That part is still not in force. She wrote to the small business minister. The reply came after a journalist started asking. A tool that writes a nicer email does not keep a regional cafe open. The only system worth running is the one that keeps chasing that letter while she is on the machine, and tells her which fight can actually close the doors. If a notice could shut your place this month, what's the one job you'd hand off so you can stay on the floor?

The sign by the till still adds a card fee: Wednesday it has to come down. From 1 October a business cannot surcharge eftpos, Visa, Mastercard or American Express. The talk this week treats that as a hit for every shop. The RBA already counted them. 85 per cent of small merchants do not add a card surcharge. They will not feel it. It lands on the ones who put the fee on the docket because the board price could not carry it. A regional cafe. A mechanic. A feed store. The fee does not vanish. It moves into the sticker price, or it comes out of what is left after wages and power. Call the rise only the card rule, when wages and power are in it too, and the ACCC calls that misleading. A chatbot will not find the old fee on your invoice. Check the till, the invoice, the booking page, and the sign. If you still add a card fee, are you lifting the board price or eating it?

The AI Boom Is Raising Your Rates Before It Helps You On Tuesday the Reserve Bank meets. All four major banks expect a hike. If they are right, the cash rate moves from 4.35 per cent to 4.60 per cent. Judo Bank says that would be the highest cash rate since 2011. ANZ still has a second move in November on the table, which would take it to 4.85 per cent, the highest since late 2008. Michele Bullock's last public comments before that meeting were at a CEDA lunch in Sydney on 22 September. She said unemployment between 4.5 and 5 per cent would probably take enough heat out of the labour market to ease inflation. Thursday's figures landed at 4.6 per cent. Employment rose by 39,000, but full-time work fell by 6,000 and part-time rose by 46,000. CommBank said the softer print is unlikely to change the discussion. Capital city coverage will stop there. A regional owner should not. In the same appearance, Bullock called AI "the great white hope" for productivity. Then she said the part the tech press will skip. There are very few signs yet that AI is influencing the supply side of the economy. There is plenty of evidence it is influencing demand. Her phrase was an "awkward sequencing event." Australia is already in excess demand, and the AI boom is adding to that demand ahead of any supply impact it might have later. The boom is data centres, power connections, construction crews, chips, and capital. That spending shows up now. It bids for electricians, concrete, and finance. It is one reason inflation is still above the target. July's print was 3.5 per cent headline and 3.6 per cent on the trimmed mean. The productivity benefit that would actually help a cafe, a farm contractor, or a small trade business has not shown up in the national numbers. You are about to pay a higher interest bill for a boom you are not in. The same day, Monetary Policy Board member Iain Ross argued there is no wage-price spiral in the current data, and that one is unlikely. So Tuesday is not about your staff getting 1970s pay rises. The pressure is a stack you already know: supply shocks you cannot negotiate, a national investment boom you do not participate in, and productivity that has averaged about 0.3 per cent a year for a decade. The Intergenerational Report, released on Monday, assumes that number returns to 1.2 per cent within five years. Bullock treated that as something to aim at, not a forecast you can bank. The standing RBA path still has inflation back inside the band around early 2028. When inflation comes down, the price level does not. Bullock said that plainly. The prices that rose stay risen. Household spending in August rose 0.1 per cent, and the growth that did show up was in essentials, not in people treating themselves. That is your customer. Here is the regional cut, because a Sydney lunch will not write it. A data centre on the edge of a capital does not raise the output of a business in north-east Victoria. It can raise the cost of the trades that used to be available locally, and the cost of the money you borrow to cover a slow month. Bullock was plain that monetary policy cannot fix productivity. A speech about frameworks will not fix the invoicing, the quoting, and the Thursday-night admin sitting on one owner's desk either. The only supply-side gain a regional operator actually controls is the hours they stop losing to work a system can do. Not a data centre. A follow-up that goes out while you are on a job. An invoice chased before it sits for weeks. A compliance check that does not eat the night before it is due. Those hours are supply. They show up in this quarter's books, not in a 2028 inflation chart. The cities will spend the next two years arguing about whether the AI boom is a bubble. Bullock said she does not have a view, and that a disorderly unwind is a risk the Bank is watching. That argument does not pay your interest. The demand shock is already in your cost base. The supply benefit is optional, and it only arrives in a regional business if someone installs it there. If Tuesday's hike lands, it will not be because your wages exploded. Part of the bill is an AI build that is adding demand before it adds output. Are you waiting for that output to show up in the national statistics, or are you taking the hours back in your own business before the next meeting?

A water truck went out in regional New South Wales this week: The customer was already buying the load because of drought. 292.5 cents a litre. ABC's average across petrol stations at 9pm last night, in New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and the Territory. I am in Wangaratta. Victoria is not in that sample. Same distance problem here. In a capital city that is a dearer commute. For a carter, a freight run, or a sparky covering three towns, the litre is the margin. Pass the rise on and you can lose a customer who is already short. Keep yesterday's price and Friday's book will not match the tank. The survival use of AI this week is not a clever demo. It is a check that runs before the key turns: fuel allowance on the job versus this morning's pump price. If the gap swallows the margin, you ring them with the new number while the load is still in the yard. If diesel moved overnight, which job would you still run at yesterday's price?

The quote sat in drafts all weekend. He knocked off Friday at four. The phone rang twice on Saturday. He was at a kid's game. Monday the customer had already given the work to someone who answered. COSBOA asked regional small businesses this year. Profit is down for 73 per cent of them. That is not a branding problem. That is a reply-speed problem wearing a cost costume. Fuel is loud. Labour is loud. The quiet leak is the quote that never left the phone. AI will not drop diesel. It will send the quote while you are still on the tools, in the voice you already use. If a job walked last month, was it price, or did you just answer too late?

She said she would be back for vintage: A regional farm could roster on that. Same hands when the fruit is on, because the hard work bought another year. Last Thursday Canberra announced that extra year is now a ballot. Third-year working holiday places are capped at 5,000, down from 31,000 who qualified this year. The regional work is still required. It no longer guarantees the visa. A first-year worker can already see the draw. If the stint no longer leads anywhere, plenty will not take it. The empty shift shows up before a single rejection. Skip the sharper job ad. Write the roster you can still run with people who live in town. Mark every shift that was a backpacker you hoped would return. That list is the survival work. A spreadsheet will do it. So will a dull flag that fires when a shift has one name, and that name depends on a visa. Build it before vintage. If your summer depends on someone who might not win a ballot, who covers the shift?

Why did the last hire fall through? Not the wage. Not the hours. He rang Sunday night. No rental in town. Start date gone. The job ad is going back up this morning. COSBOA asked regional small businesses this year. 52 per cent rated housing access in their community as poor. That is the labour shortage. Not the ad. AI will not build a house. It will not move the cash rate. What it can do is take quoting, follow-ups and invoice chasing off a short crew so the owner is not still at the laptop at 9pm. If you are a person down this week, which job would you pay never to do again?