AI development and automation for Australian businesses

What we build for Australian businesses

Four kinds of project suit a remote team well. Each is ordinary AI development, scoped around the rules further down this page rather than around a template.

• A support or sales chatbot on your website or WhatsApp that answers from your own documents, built as a RAG chatbot with a handoff to a person.
• An AI agent that reads incoming email or web forms, fills in the CRM and drafts a reply for a human to approve.
• Document processing for invoices, quotes, referral letters or supplier forms, with a review queue for anything the model is unsure about.
• Workflow automation in n8n, Make or Zapier that links the tools you already pay for, with AI only in the steps that need judgment.

Liftup has served 350+ businesses, with clients in 8 countries, over 7+ years. Our head office is in Pune, India, and you do not need to be near any of our offices to start.

The Privacy Act and APP 8, in plain terms

To our knowledge, Australia has not passed an AI-specific law for private companies. The rules that matter are the Privacy Act 1988 and its thirteen Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), plus the Australian Consumer Law, which covers misleading statements whether a person or a bot makes them.

Businesses with annual turnover of 3 million Australian dollars or less are often exempt from the Privacy Act. The exemption does not cover health service providers or anyone who trades in personal information. If you are unsure, build as if the Act applies. It rarely changes the design much.

Privacy reforms passed in late 2024 add a transparency duty for automated decisions that significantly affect people, with a start date of 10 December 2026. If your agent approves, rejects or prices anything about a person, ask your lawyer how that duty applies to you.

Time zones: how Australia lines up with India

India Standard Time (IST) is UTC+5:30 all year and never changes for daylight saving. Most of Australia changes clocks on the first Sunday of April and October, so the gap moves twice a year. The table assumes a 10:00 to 18:00 working day in India and 9:00 to 17:00 on your side.

Sydney moved to daylight time on 4 October 2026, so 15:30 in Sydney is 10:00 in India at the moment. In practice we suggest one standing call inside the shared hours, written updates for everything else, and a build log you can read the next morning. Perth and Adelaide have more room for live working sessions.

A worked example: privacy checks before a support bot goes live

Imagine a Melbourne physiotherapy group that wants a bot to answer questions and book appointments. This is a made-up example, not a client. These are the steps, in order.

1. Map the dataList every field the bot can see or collect: name, phone, injury notes, appointment times. Injury notes are health information, which the Privacy Act treats as sensitive and holds to a higher standard.
2. Choose where processing happensPick a model provider and region, then write down every place the text travels: the provider, our build environment, your booking system. That list is your APP 8 record.
3. Cut what the bot does not needStop the bot asking for injury details in free text. Route clinical questions to a person.
4. Write the noticeAdd a one-line banner at the start of the chat and a paragraph in the privacy policy.
5. Test with real questionsRun 40 or so past enquiries from your inbox with names removed. Mark each answer correct, wrong or unsafe, and fix the wrong and unsafe ones before launch.
6. Set retention and handoffDelete chat logs on a schedule you choose and make sure 'speak to a person' works on every screen.

Prices and currency

We do not publish prices for our own work. You get a fixed quote after a short call, which you can start on the contact page. For context, here is market data from the Clutch AI pricing guide: AI projects typically cost $10,000 to $49,999, and the average is $120,595. Those are US dollars and cover a wide spread, from one chatbot to large custom systems.

To read them in Australian dollars, multiply by the exchange rate on the day you pay, not the day you read this, and leave room in the budget for the rate to move. GST at 10% applies to services supplied inside Australia. For services bought from an overseas supplier by a GST-registered business, the supplier normally does not charge GST, but check the treatment with your accountant before you sign.

When you do not need a custom build

If the whole job is 'summarize this email and add a row to a sheet', a single Zapier or Make scenario does it in an afternoon and you can build it yourself. If your staff already work in Microsoft 365, try Copilot first. A call with us makes sense when answers must come from your documents, when data must stay in one region, or when the process crosses three or more systems. The page on custom AI vs off the shelf walks through the trade-offs.