en.Wedoany.com Reported - The City of Melbourne has selected Databricks to build a unified data and artificial intelligence platform, which currently supports over 700 production datasets and more than 40 AI application scenarios within the council. This deployment consolidates information previously scattered across multiple tools, systems, and on-premises infrastructure into the council's existing Data Central platform.
After evaluating the technical architecture, the council found that employees spent significant time manually collecting and organizing data, and that inconsistent standards and fragmented systems led to low analysis efficiency and collaboration difficulties. The council subsequently decided to integrate legacy tools and isolated systems into a single data, analytics, and AI platform.
One of the platform's most prominent applications is a pedestrian chatbot. Council staff, urban planners, and local businesses can ask natural language questions to understand pedestrian traffic patterns in Melbourne. The chatbot relies on near-real-time data from the city's sensor network and aims to reduce reliance on specialized data requests. According to the council, the tool can be used to analyze movement trends in different areas, supporting regional planning, staffing, and local event decisions. Additionally, the platform is applied in areas such as knowledge base management, predictive urban operations, citizen service intelligence, and financial analysis.
The pedestrian chatbot is available to both internal and external users. Local businesses can use it to understand people flow in the city and adjust staffing, business hours, or plan local events accordingly; council teams leverage the same data for planning and economic analysis. In the future, the City of Melbourne plans to add other data sources to the chatbot, such as events, disruptions, and road traffic information, to provide a more comprehensive view of urban dynamics, expanding the system from simple pedestrian counting to multidimensional metrics covering factors that influence how residents, workers, and visitors use the city.
Councillor Andrew Rowse, Chair of the Innovation and Education Portfolio at the City of Melbourne, stated that the partnership with Databricks focuses on developing AI solutions that address real-world problems while building internal AI capabilities, aligning with the city's strategic priorities and AI principles. He emphasized that every solution ultimately serves the Melbourne community, and the infrastructure built on Databricks gives the council confidence to extend its impact citywide.
Databricks views the Melbourne project as a microcosm of a broader trend in government and public services: agencies are seeking to deploy AI projects in operational environments while governing the underlying data. Databricks noted that the combination of a centralized data environment with practical service applications is becoming a new model in this sector. Adam Beavis, Vice President and Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand at Databricks, said this shift has moved beyond the experimental phase. He believes that the best AI should be embedded in daily experiences, helping organizations accelerate operations, optimize decisions, and achieve better outcomes. Through the secure and controlled data and AI foundation built with Databricks, the City of Melbourne supports faster city services, smarter operations, and tangible impacts for residents. Melbourne exemplifies the overall transformation Databricks observes in the public sector: organizations are moving AI from experimentation to large-scale production.
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