The short version. Connect Your Way is now listed in the National AI Centre’s AI Directory, the Australian Government’s public register of organisations that help other businesses adopt AI. It is a listing, not an award. But for a one-person Canberra firm, it is the first time a neutral party has written down what we do and put it somewhere a buyer can check.
What the AI Directory is
The National AI Centre sits inside the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. Its AI Directory is a searchable list of Australian “AI enablers”: consultancies, software developers and service providers that help businesses put AI to work. Organisations nominate themselves, describe what they do, and the Centre reviews the submission before it goes up. Buyers can filter by state, by the kind of help they need and by the type of AI involved.
Our entry sits under the ACT, with these categories:
| What we are listed for | What it covers in practice |
|---|---|
| AI enablement and AI deployment | Scoping a single process, building the system, running it after launch |
| Consulting | The discovery session that starts every engagement |
| Software development | Our own code: the chatbot, the receptionist, the quote configurator, the client portal |
| Generative AI and virtual assistants | AI receptionists and website chatbots built on Anthropic’s Claude models |
| Data management and analysis | Workflow automation that sorts, summarises and routes the work |
The description on the directory was written from what we actually do, including the parts that are deliberately unglamorous: deployments are staged and reversible, every system is tested against real enquiries before it goes live, and clients get summaries of what the system handled and what it passed to a person.
What a listing is not
A directory listing is not an endorsement, an accreditation or a quality mark. The Centre does not audit our work and it does not recommend one provider over another. Anyone reading our entry should treat it the way they would treat an ABN lookup: proof that the organisation exists, does what it says, and was willing to be described in public on a government site.
That is still worth something, and here is why.
Why it matters for a business weighing up AI
Most of the businesses we work with are trades, clinics and small professional firms without an IT team. When they look for AI help, they are choosing between a flood of near-identical websites, each promising the same things. There is almost no way to tell a company that builds and runs its own systems from one that resells someone else’s chatbot with a new logo.
A government directory does not solve that, but it narrows the field. It confirms the organisation is Australian, that it put its name to a description, and that it is operating in the open. For a buyer in Canberra, combining that with our Google Business Profile, our reviews and the fact that the chatbot on our own website is the same one we deploy for clients gives a fuller picture than a sales call ever will.
How it happened
We nominated ourselves in September, during the same stretch when we were listing the business on the local directories and tidying up our Google Business Profile. The submission asked for the facts: who we are, where we operate, what we build, which technologies we use and who we work with. We wrote it the way we write this blog, plainly, and the Centre published it this week.
There was no fee and no sponsorship involved. If you run an Australian business that helps others use AI, you can nominate your own organisation the same way.
Closing remarks
I’ll be honest about what I felt when the listing went live: relief more than pride. Small businesses spend a long time being invisible, and the only things that make you visible are the slow ones — reviews, directories, pages that earn their place in search, work that clients will talk about. There is no shortcut, and I have stopped looking for one.
What I like about the AI Directory is that it rewards the boring virtues. It asked what we build, not how we describe ourselves. It wanted to know whether our deployments can be rolled back, whether we test against real enquiries, whether clients can try before they commit. Those are the questions I wish every business asked a provider before signing, and they are the questions I would answer the same way whether a government department was listening or not.
So: we are on the list. It changes nothing about the work on Monday. It does mean that when a Canberra clinic or tradie types “AI help Australia” into a government site, we are one of the names they can check out, with the facts already written down by someone other than us. For a business that has been doing this quietly since 2023 and only started saying so out loud this year, I’ll take that.
If you are weighing up AI for your business and want to start with one process rather than a transformation, tell us what’s eating your time and we’ll scope a single fix first.