Making the complex clear: AI at our Business Breakfast
At our Business Breakfast on Friday 21 August, Anshul Chopra of Microsoft Australia showed 74 guests at the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club how to take AI from hype to reality: start small, keep people in charge and begin with one task this week.
Most people in the room already used AI in some form. Far fewer could have said what it was really doing for their business. Anshul, an Account Executive with Microsoft, offered advice that was more modest than the headlines. He described AI as a capable but imperfect assistant. It’s very good at the first 80 per cent of routine written work, such as drafting emails and proposals, summarising long contracts and answering questions from a firm’s own documents. The judgement and the responsibility stay with people, and his working rule was simple: AI drafts, people decide.
He urged businesses to start where the work is repetitive and the risk is low, one workflow at a time. As an example he walked through a month-end accounting close, where AI does the first pass and a qualified accountant reviews the exceptions and signs off the figures. He was just as firm about the guardrails: keep client data out of public tools, check every fact, and make sure a named person owns each important output. In his view the real gap isn’t the technology but how a firm organises itself around it.
The questions kept coming until time ran out. Our MC, Marion Macleod, said afterwards that Anshul had made the complex much clearer for everyone, and that the jury is still out on Claude versus ChatGPT.
Ian Bentley then spoke briefly about Rotary for the guests who hadn’t met us before. He explained what Rotary is and does, and invited them to consider joining a powerful international humanitarian organisation. That invitation is the real purpose of a breakfast like this. It brings people who might never come to a Tuesday lunch into contact with the club, on a subject that matters to their working lives.
An event of this kind depends on careful preparation. Mark Eldredge, our Membership Director, led it from first idea to final running sheet. He arranged a dry run with the speaker, organised the audio-visual set-up in the Stadium Room and coordinated the table captains who welcomed each guest. Terry Kitchen managed the bookings, and the Membership Committee shared the many smaller tasks. Our thanks to all of them, to Marion for steering the morning so warmly, and to Ananth from Microsoft, who came along as back-up speaker. Above all, our thanks to Anshul for giving his time and expertise so generously.