The ABC has spent more than $4 million developing two artificial intelligence tools over the past three years, including a chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The chatbot, dubbed ABC Assist, drew $2.7 million in investment across the 2024 and 2025 financial years. It accounted for more than half the broadcaster’s AI spending over the past three years, according to figures obtained by Capital Brief under freedom of information laws.
The ABC’s Innovation Lab described the tool as a “knowledge navigator” before the unit was gutted in a wave of redundancies announced by managing director Hugh Marks in June. It was slated for rollout across the broadcaster later this year.
“To answer this brief, the [machine learning/AI] team started building a system that combines a large language model (LLM), the generative technology behind ChatGPT, with retrieval augmented generation (RAG),” the Innovation Lab team wrote late last year.
