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June 17, 2025
“Why would we call it something when it is an experience?” questioned Vivek Trivedi, resisting the urge to follow market convention.
A commendable position to take considering the industry is littered with new solution launches under the banner of artificial intelligence (AI) – each carrying a one-syllable name designed to be sophisticated yet edgy.
Run a two-second request by ChatGPT and the chatbot suggestions are endless. Why not try Sal (as in ‘Service AI Liaison’), Meg (‘Machine-Enabled Guide’) or Dan (‘Digital Assistant Node’)?
As CEO of Exigo Tech, Trivedi smiled and side-stepped the lazy journalism question. This isn’t about giving products personalities.
“We were thinking of adding some name or blurb to it but we didn’t want to label something which is designed to be very simple,” he confirmed.
And perhaps in the age of AI opportunity, that’s exactly the point – tone down the hysteria, less of the PR and away with the embellishment.
“For the past two years, we have been engaging with local councils and they are desperate to provide the best experience to their customers – the citizens,” Trivedi outlined.
“Citizens are questioning why they have a different experience between the public sector and the private sector? Why is the normal way of engaging in the private sector not available in the public sector?”
What is considered table stakes in the highly competitive world of private enterprise – i.e. transformative applications that are agile and transparent, underpinned by structured data and robust security – is commonly viewed as a luxury in the government space. Out of reach and inaccessible.
“The challenge is that the council wants to achieve that but they need the most efficient solutions,” Trivedi added.
“For that they need the right kind of partners who not only understand this problem but understand their ecosystem and how to enable and empower them through technology.”
So instead of brainstorming ‘cool’ product names and colour schemes, Trivedi and the team at Exigo Tech rolled up their sleeves and went deep in the trenches. This was 12 months of meticulous research, millions of dollars worth of investment and a dedicated team designed to extract the true challenges facing local council today.
“If a country is going through a change and you’re helping to provide 0.01% of that change, you feel very proud to make that contribution,” Trivedi shared.
Councils are challenged, in more ways than one
In drawing on some of the observations gathered during the assessment phase, Trivedi stressed that while local government councils in Australia are under increasing pressure to innovate with technology, they face a range of structural and strategic challenges.
“Actually, it’s between four to six problems at any given time,” he noted.
“We built a solution based on those challenges but we wanted to move away from the old and traditional way of delivery which involves running a large scoping session.
“This places a huge time burden on councils and means the entire delivery process becomes one to two years in length. By the time the solution is rolled out, new processes come in and the implementation becomes old.”
Instead – and armed with deep sector knowledge – the team at Exigo Tech tackled the issues head-on in the build phase of the product.
As shared by Trivedi, the key challenges are:
In response, Exigo Tech has created a customer experience offering built upon the latest technologies from Microsoft and the connectivity strength of the Telstra network.
The solution operates end-to-end to provide an entire segmentation of the service delivered, specifically targeted based on a specific use case. For example, a solution for customer service or a solution for waste management.
“Rather than competing with what is already in the market, we have created a platform that integrates instead,” Trivedi explained.
“We don’t want to derail councils or make their life more difficult by telling them what they can and can’t use. Instead, our approach is to provide an interface for using those systems which is more efficient and streamlined.”
For example, if James Henderson is building a house in Mosman, Sydney, then he will be required to make a development application (DA) submission.
Currently, that goes into the system and citizens have to constantly check on the progress of that submission.
But behind the scenes, that is allocated to a resource to manually check and approve. In this instance, could AI scan the document to ensure all initial requirements are met and either automate an action or progress the application?
“That’s a very small example,” Trivedi added.
“But it’s all about improving efficiencies and accelerating the delivery and quality of the professional services that councils provide. The aim is to strengthen the trust between councils and the community.”
The topic of trust extends to data governance and cyber security which are growing concerns within local government.
As councils digitise more citizen services – from waste management to urban planning – they are responsible for managing and protecting sensitive personal data, often without robust cyber security frameworks in place.
The pace of regulatory and policy change, combined with limited inter-council collaboration, also hampers agility and innovation.
“Yes, security is a huge consideration,” Trivedi expanded.
“You don’t want data without a strong and secure back-end, hence our partnership with Microsoft. As a specialist partner in Australia, we leverage secure offerings across the entire suite of Microsoft solutions from Outlook to Azure to Dynamics 365.”
Exigo Tech is aligned to the belief that modernisation related to AI should work on the premise that the two pillars of AI are data and security.
“There is a lot of unstructured data which is floating around organisations which may or may not be secure,” Trivedi said.
“We understand structured and unstructured data exists within councils which is why we’ve built a solution to access that information in a very secure way, present it to the world in a very secure way and accept structured data back into the system.”
In addition, the collection of structured data is also pushed back into incumbent systems which are now enabled by clean data.
“For example, TechnologyOne and Civica are large service providers in this space with brilliant systems, so why would we advise the council to move away from those?” Trivedi said. “We are providing a tier which integrates with those two systems and inserts structured data into the software.
“Clean data also allows for improved visualisation of data, visualisation of ticketing systems and visualisation of tasks. This level of insight will help change the very average view of council today, in terms of value for taxpayer money.”
This approach also tackles an ongoing roadblock facing local government around legacy infrastructure – many councils operate on outdated systems that are expensive to maintain and difficult to integrate with modern digital solutions.
“Rather than starting from scratch, we’re providing a vanilla version housing baseline functionalities with the option to add more and change based on requirements,” Trivedi continued.
“Different requirements exist from council to council but approximately 80% of things are common so we have focused on that as a start, then we can customise on top based on specific demand.”
Fresh thinking creates new experience standard
Founded in 2015, Exigo Tech is a managed service provider (MSP) specialising in the delivery of Microsoft technologies.
The Sydney-based business first entered the local government space two years ago, influenced by almost a decade of private sector expertise. Alongside Niten Devalia – Co-Founder and Chief Sales Officer – the company has delivered more than 1350 technology projects, spanning five countries.
“It happens,” Trivedi said. “There have been so many players in the council space for 15-20 years but we’re the new kid on the block and we see things in a different way.”
Using the emergence of Kylian Mbappé on the world scene of football as an analogy, Trivedi articulated where Exigo Tech fit in the public sector ecosystem.
“When Mbappe came in, it was never about Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo or Neymar not being good any more – it was just that he was different,” Trivedi explained.
“In my opinion, he completely changed the meaning of speed and skill and that became an addition for the fans. If you convert that thinking to local council, our arrival is to help improve the relationship with citizens in the same way.”
Currently, the MSP is working with five councils which provided on-the-ground experience regarding the true priorities of public sector agencies.
“We realised that it’s not about cloud migrations or just providing an application or licence, we had to go much deeper than that to add value,” Trivedi said.
According to Moxie Research, 87% of Australian businesses will allocate additional budget to AI projects in 2025. In addition, 78% will build a cross-functional team to set AI strategy while 69% will define clear AI business objectives.
Moxie Research surveyed 302 IT decision-makers across Australia in November 2024, zoning in on AI investment and outsourcing priorities. Findings were presented at Moxie Authority 2025.
To maximise the benefits of AI – and of note to the local channel – 46% of organisations will increase partnerships with specialist third-party IT vendors and partners during the next 6-12 months.
But despite such positive outsourcing intent, the AI ecosystem is in a state of permanent flux as new players enter the market and competition increases.
On AI, the type of technology outsourcing partners that Australian businesses currently work with are vendors (64%), data specialists (49%) and ISVs (48%). This is followed by software developers (46%), business advisory / consultancy firms (44%), MSPs (44%) and system integrators (43%).
Delving deeper, the most important business characteristics that organisations seek when working with an AI third-party partner are:
“The depth that we provide is around customer experience,” Trivedi added. “This is based on 12 months of research examining annual reports published by councils, including the statistics shared and the demands issued by the CEOs.
“Our dedicated team then probed what the real problems were and digitalisation was viewed as a fatigue, not as an enabler. Customer experience is everything for councils because serving the citizen is the primary goal.”
Citing waste management as a primary example of a process ripe for disruption, Trivedi shared the current approach to applying for a bigger rubbish bin in Sydney.
“You go online, you apply and then what happens behind the scenes is it all becomes a manual process,” he documented.
“Why? Because that email goes to someone, then it’s converted into a ticket in a third-party system. The third-party passes the ticket onto the vendor supplier to deliver and the cycle starts over.
“It’s all over the place so why not just create a single glass view to help provide efficiency and agility at the front-end?”
Looking ahead, Trivedi recommended that councils embrace strategic partnerships by adopting agile and scalable platforms to future-proof their services and meet rising community expectations.
In short, the objective is to “change the paradigm” with the best possible technology set available today.
“This wouldn’t have been possible 12 months ago,” Trivedi acknowledged. “Even AI technology was cumbersome then but the technology has gained immense maturity in this time across AI, data and security.”
The solution is available for all councils of Australia – irrespective of state or territory – and can be consumed via subscription licence.
“Councils shouldn’t face huge expense when digesting new technologies,” Trivedi said. “Our advice is to consume this in smaller bites to understand what works and what doesn’t. We can be agile alongside – learning fast, failing fast and redeploying fast.”
Such an approach served the team at Exigo Tech well during the initial build phase of the solution. Transitioning from a services business to a product-driven company demands a profound internal mindset shift.
In a services model, success is typically measured by client satisfaction, billable hours and tailored solutions. Teams are accustomed to reacting to specific customer needs, often delivering bespoke outcomes.
However, building a product requires a shift toward scalability, repeatability and long-term vision. This evolution requires teams to adopt a product-centric culture – prioritising user research, investing in design thinking and embracing continuous iteration.
“We had to build a separate team and recruit specialist consultants with expertise in council issues,” Trivedi outlined.
“We never allowed ourselves to fixate on one particular problem set, rather cover the horizons and focus on a couple of important points specific to issues that councils are facing.
“Plus, it’s built in such a way that the solution has its own agility based upon the client requirements of each council. Striking that personnel balance was crucial and the biggest learning was that a product mindset is very different to a project mindset.”
The experience in Australia – accelerated by a strong in-market partnership with Microsoft – has propelled the company overseas in the form of new customers in Singapore, Philippines and India.
What started as back-end support functions in Philippines and India, quickly morphed into client facing work in each local market.
In India, that includes government sector work in the digital meter space aligned to the big picture vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi through the Digital India campaign.
“Being a native Indian that has lived in Australia for more than 25 years, I’m incredibly proud that we are contributing in some capacity to that vision,” Trivedi added.
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