There is now cheap, government-backed help to get your business using AI

Most government announcements aimed at small business are safe to scroll past. This one is worth stopping on, because it puts something concrete and cheap in reach: real help learning how to use AI in your business, backed by public funding, for close to nothing.

From July 2026, the federal Australian Small Business Advisory Services (ASBAS) Digital Solutions program has relaunched for another round, and for the first time it lists AI and emerging technologies as one of its core topics. It sits alongside the usual suspects (getting online, digital marketing and selling, business software, and cyber security), but the AI addition is the newsworthy part. The government has effectively decided that helping small businesses get their heads around AI is now core digital literacy, not a nice-to-have.

What you actually get

The details are refreshingly plain. According to business.gov.au, if you are a small business with 19 or fewer employees, an active ABN and you are currently trading, you can access:

• Free workshops, webinars and self-directed tutorials across those digital topics, including the new AI stream.
• Up to five hours of one-to-one mentoring with a digital adviser, for a one-off $110 including GST. If you can show financial hardship, even that is waived.

That is not a typo. Five hours of tailored, one-on-one advice for a hundred and ten dollars. For a business owner who has been meaning to work out where AI fits but never had a sensible, low-stakes place to start, it is about as low a barrier as these things get.

Worth being clear on one thing: the grant money itself goes to the advisory providers who deliver the program, not into your bank account. You are not applying for a cash grant. You are getting subsidised access to people whose job is to help you build digital capability. Different thing, still valuable.

Why the AI addition matters now

The timing is not an accident. The gap in Australian small business right now is not enthusiasm for AI, it is knowing what to actually do with it. Plenty of owners have opened ChatGPT, been mildly impressed, and then closed the tab because there was no obvious next step that connected to the real work of running the business.

A structured intro, delivered by someone who is not trying to sell you a platform, is a good way to close that first gap. It gets you literate. It helps you tell the difference between a genuine time-saver and a shiny demo. It gives you the vocabulary to ask better questions. For a lot of businesses, that clarity alone is worth more than the hundred and ten dollars.

The honest limit worth knowing before you start

Here is the part the press release will not tell you, and it matters.

A webinar and five hours of general mentoring will make you AI-literate. It will not wire AI into your business. Those are two very different jobs.

Learning what is possible is step one. Actually connecting an AI tool to your quoting, your inbox, your booking system or your CRM, so it quietly saves you hours every week without a human copying and pasting between six tabs, is the step where value actually shows up. That work is specific to how your business runs, and it does not come out of a group workshop.

We see this pattern constantly. A business does the course, feels genuinely more informed, and three months later nothing has changed in the day-to-day, because “we learned about AI” quietly became the finish line instead of the starting line. The literacy was real. The result never got built.

How to get the most out of it

Used well, the program is a great first move. Here is a sensible way to play it:

• Do the AI stream, and go in with your own list. Before the workshop, write down the three most annoying, repetitive tasks in your week. The ones that eat time and quietly cost you jobs when they slip. Learn against those, not against generic examples.
• Spend the five mentoring hours on your situation, not the tool of the week. A good adviser will help you spot where AI genuinely fits your operations. Push past the demo and ask “where in my business would this actually save time, and what would it take to set up?”
• Treat the outcome as a shortlist, not a solution. You should come out with one or two clear, worthwhile places to put AI to work. Then it is about building it properly, once, so it sticks.

That last step is the work we do with Melbourne businesses every week: taking a promising idea and actually wiring it into the tools you already run, with a person still in charge of anything that matters. The program is a genuinely good place to get literate. When you are ready to turn “we should probably use AI for that” into hours back in your week, book a free digital systems audit and we will map out where it would pay off first, in plain language and with no hard sell.