Sydney, Australia, 22 October 2025 – International Data Corporation (IDC) today announced the national winners of the IDC Future Enterprise Awards (FEA) 2025 for Australia. With the rapid rise of Generative AI, the awards aim to recognise future-focused organisations adopting innovative business models to build and sustain competitive digital operations in 2025 and beyond.
Now in its ninth year, the IDC Future Enterprise Awards have recognised digital transformation excellence across Asia/Pacific since 2017. Over 4,000 unique organisations have submitted nominations, with more than 700 winners celebrated regionally to date.
“Australia’s 2025 winners demonstrate how digital transformation has entered a new phase — one where AI is embedded in the very fabric of organisational strategy,” said Linus Lai, vice president, Digital Business, IDC Asia/Pacific. “Australia’s 2025 winners demonstrate how digital transformation has entered a new phase — one where AI is embedded in the very fabric of organisational strategy,” said Linus Lai, vice president, Digital Business, IDC Asia/Pacific. “From improving public service experiences to reimagining how employees access knowledge and policy information, these winners represent the next frontier of innovation: human-centered, trustworthy, and measurable.”
The following are the best out of all the nominations received from Australia:
Best in Artificial and Generative Intelligence | Knowledge Retrieval Chatbot by City of Sydney
City of Sydney’s Knowledge Retrieval Chatbot turns a sprawling archive of 700-plus policy PDFs on the CityNet intranet into instant, conversational answers. Built in only six weeks and natively on a secure stack, the bot uses a retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) pattern so staff can simply ask, “How much petty cash can I claim?” and receive the exact paragraph – with the source document linked for transparency. The impact is immediate: in a month-long pilot with employees across the organisation, 71% said they retrieved information significantly faster and rated the overall experience 4.2 / 5; more than half said they would “miss the bot” if it were turned off. By collapsing search times by two-to-three minutes per query and freeing teams from document-digging, the chatbot boosts productivity, lifts confidence in policy compliance, and crucially acts as the City’s safe on-ramp to customer-focused generative-AI innovation.
CIO/CTO of the Year | Dr. Tom Gao, City of Sydney
Under the leadership of Dr. Tom Gao, the City of Sydney launched the CityConnect ecosystem, digitising 84 council services into a unified, personalised online platform. CityConnect’s innovative, mobile-first approach streamlined interactions, reducing customer service calls, cutting in-person visits by 19%, and halving follow-up inquiries. Since launch, CityConnect processed over 322,000 community requests and 84,000 financial transactions in the first 12 months. Complementing this, advanced 3D virtual tours using LiDAR technology were implemented for over 80 city venues, reducing initial guided tours by 50%. Lastly, the Public Access IT initiative integrated digital newspapers, 3D printers, and laser cutters into community spaces. It significantly boosted community digital literacy and empowered job seekers, driving nearly 10,000 monthly computer sessions in libraries and community centres.
Special Award for Customer Experience | City of Sydney Social Media Platform by City of Sydney
The City of Sydney’s Social Media Platform (SMP) consolidates citizen-facing conversations across Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn into a single cloud-based system. Designed around empathy and trust, the SMP empowers staff to deliver personalised, human-centered experiences at scale. With intelligent workflows, sentiment analysis, and case routing, inquiries are triaged and resolved swiftly, lifting first-response performance from 60% to 93%. Executive dashboards offer live insight into emerging community concerns, enabling proactive responses. The initiative reflects a broader shift: from fragmented, transactional communication to cohesive, journey-based engagement. Operational benefits include over 90,000 messages managed in its first year; $80,000 in annual licence savings; and one full-time day per week redirected to proactive storytelling.
The Australia winners now advance to the regional competition against other country winners from across Asia/Pacific where they will be judged by a panel of international experts. Regional winners will be celebrated at the IDC Asia/Pacific Technology Symposium and Awards 2025, to be held on 20 November 2025 in Singapore. Join us at this event to hear from industry experts and previous award winners as they share key strategies and best practices for navigating emerging technologies and driving regional growth.
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