Here’s what separates a genuinely useful AI from a glorified FAQ.

17 July 2025

Have you ever tried to get a straight answer from a website's chatbot, only to end up more frustrated than when you started? You’re probably used to ignoring when they are on a website because they are often useless.

This is what chatbots were like a few years ago. Some businesses tried to add "AI" to their sites, but what they would get was little more than a script that couldn’t handle real-world questions, or they constrain it to so few context sources it cannot answer many real enquiries that users have.

I was on the Fair Work Ombudsman's website the other day and decided to test out their virtual assistant, "Frankie".

To call it a chatbot is being pretty generous. When I asked it a simple question like, "what is the award for a foreman at a concrete plant?", it just gave me a generic disclaimer and told me to go look it up myself. It couldn't even tell me the minimum wage for a graphic designer without suggesting completely irrelevant awards.

You can try it here: workready.au/ but IT ONLY WORKS ON DESKTOP WEB BROWSERS CURRENTLY if you use a phone it won’t grab the Gemini API Key correctly, it’s just a limitation of the Google AI prototype platform.

I’ve published a demo video about it here: youtube.com/watch?v=QV0YQ-uORhE

Worse, when I tried to give it the text from a real job ad to analyse, it just threw an error. This is the problem with most off-the-shelf chatbots. They don't understand context. They can't take a specific document, like your internal safety policy or a job description, and use it to provide a genuinely useful answer. They just match keywords to pre-written responses.

This is the problem with many off-the-shelf chatbots. They don't understand context.

They can't take a specific document, like your internal safety policy or a job description, and use it to provide a genuinely useful answer. They just match keywords to pre-written responses.

So, I wanted to see what a *real* AI assistant could do.

I built a quick demo called the "Aussie Workplace Advisor". It's powered by Google's latest AI, and the key difference is that it's designed to understand context and research facts from trusted sources.

I gave it the same job ad for a graphic designer that broke the Fair Work bot. My tool not only identified the correct award (the Graphic Arts, Printing and Publishing Award) but also created a detailed summary of the key entitlements.

Then I asked it a much harder question: "If I work in this job from 9am to 2pm, Monday to Thursday, what would the minimum award wage be?"

This requires multiple steps: understanding the hours, calculating the weekly total, finding the correct award level, and then doing the maths. Answering this would take a human a fair bit of time sifting through award documents.

My advisor researched the answer, showed its calculations, and provided a clear, specific weekly wage. It even generated follow-up questions based on our conversation. Below is an example of a similar query about another role.

The point isn't just to pick on the government's tech. It's to show the massive difference between a scripted response bot or one that has so few tools available it can’t do much for you and an AI that can actually reason and research.

This is where the real value is for businesses.

Imagine having an internal tool that your staff could ask questions to, which knows your company policies inside and out and can check them against the latest official regulations. That's the kind of thing that saves serious time and reduces risk.

If you're thinking about using AI in your business, don't settle for a glorified FAQ.

Let's talk about what's actually possible.

Oh and it generates an image for each research note, just because :D.

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