Good morning.

Today's numbers say AI grows the economy and adds jobs overall, while quietly taking some from mining and farming. The useful move isn't the forecast, it's checking what the AI already in your email is doing.

In today’s briefing:

⚡Canberra will override Queensland and the NT on data centre power

⛏️A Queensland zinc mine's AI plant controller turns one

💼 EY: AI could make the economy almost $120b bigger

🖼️The DALL·E GPT shuts on 30 August

🩺GP clinics tested AI scribes across 120,000 consultations

🛠️ Tool Spotlight Zapier: plumbing between apps that don't talk to each other

Following on from last week's state revolt: the energy minister told the National Press Club the Commonwealth will override Queensland and the NT, the two holdouts. Gas-only data centres would fail the minimum standards and couldn't register at all. Queensland's treasurer calls it a grab for "increased power to Canberra".

Why it matters for you: The market regulator has warned that without rule changes, connection costs get spread "across the consumer base at no clear consumer benefit" meaning your power bill.

Source: The Guardian

MMG's Dugald River near Cloncurry uses a digital copy of its flotation circuit to adjust the plant as the ore feed changes, built with Hatch and reported by iTnews on 22 July. Recovery beat its old benchmarks and, more usefully, steadied.

Why it matters for you: Consistency is the boring benefit nobody sells you and the one that shows up in the accounts. If your version is "the job runs differently depending who's on shift", that's the payoff.

Source: iTnews

The Daily Rundown: EY modelling published this morning puts the economy 2.6% to 3.2% larger by the middle of next decade because of AI, worth $95bn to $116bn, and 36,000 to 44,000 more jobs. The gains are lumpy: close to 10,000 extra construction jobs, a similar number in retail, 6,000 in transport and warehousing. So are the losses, almost 3,000 jobs each in agriculture and mining, the capital-heavy sectors machines replace cleanly.

Translated: a consultancy modelled a decade out, so read the direction, not the decimals.

Practical takeaway: In construction, retail and transport the pressure stays on finding people. So the AI worth paying for is whatever takes admin off the staff you have.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

The Daily Rundown: OpenAI confirmed on 31 July that the official DALL·E GPT inside ChatGPT retires on 30 August, and told users to save anything they want to keep. Making pictures isn't going away; it moves to ChatGPT Images, where most people already work. The catch is the archive — for a lot of people those old chats are the only copy.

Practical takeaway: If you made logos, social tiles or mockups in there, spend fifteen minutes saving them to your own drive. The people who get burned treat chat history as storage.

Source: OpenAI

The Daily Rundown: After three months of complaints that AI answers were burying the actual emails, Microsoft confirmed on 23 July it had "decided not to move forward" with Copilot suggestions in the Outlook search box. If you saw them in new Outlook, they'll vanish as the rollback reaches you. Reversals like this only happen when enough people complain.

Practical takeaway: From late August the Copilot button in classic Outlook gets bigger, with no way to move or shrink it. Worth knowing before someone rings about a button they didn't ask for.

Source: Office Watch, Neowin

Ten practices and 43 GPs across the Hunter, New England and Central Coast spent twelve months using AI scribes, which listen to the consultation and write the notes, across more than 120,000 patient visits. More than 80% of clinicians were satisfied and the network reported no safety or data governance problems, with doctors still approving every note. Time-saving figures came from vendor modelling, so discount those.

Why it matters for you: It's the clearest Australian evidence yet that note-taking AI survives real work, not just a demo. What made it hold was the boring part: consent, Australian data hosting, and a human signing off.

Source: Hunter New England and Central Coast PHN

Zapier — plumbing between apps that don't talk to each other. Describe the job in plain English ("when someone fills in my website form, add them to my spreadsheet and text me") and it drafts the steps. Free tier covers a couple of automations. When one breaks it breaks silently, so only automate things you'd notice going missing.

Verdict: Worth a Saturday morning if you're retyping the same details into two apps.

Make it argue against the purchase. Ask AI to compare two options and you get a tidy list leaning toward whatever sounds newest. In training rooms this is the slowest habit to shift: people ask for a recommendation instead of the case against.

I'm choosing between [option A] and [option B] for [the job]. Argue the strongest case against each, including ongoing costs and what happens if I want to leave. Then tell me which you'd pick and what would make that wrong.

The GP scribes story above only works because of one boring detail: a human still signs off on every note. That checking habit is exactly what How to Tell When AI Is Lying to You builds, six lessons on catching AI confidently wrong before it reaches your work. And if today's other thread landed, AI taking admin off your team rather than replacing them, Basic AI Workflows That Save You Hours turns that into five workflows you can run this week. Both are in the AI Foundations track at Vortex Academy.