Fast50 company TechConnect and Moreton Bay Regional Council simplify Census data usage for SMBs

Gold Coast, Queensland-based data management and cloud migration solutions provider and CRN Fast50 company TechConnect has partnered with Moreton Bay Regional Council (MBRC) to create an AI tool designed to provide small to medium businesses (SMBs) in the region with easier access to Census data and insights for marketing and other purposes.

Census data was already available for such tasks, but it was often "located in more than 20 pages or unrelated information", according to a TechConnect statement.

The new tool is a bot titled ‘Ask Morty’ which uses anonymised Census data to help SMBs reduce the time and effort needed for recruitment and marketing campaigns – a particularly important topic given the skills and jobs shortages in Southeast Queensland.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS)-hosted bot makes available, “in a simple process, relevant anonymised 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics census data of the Council’s almost 500,000 citizens (across three simple variables around potential customer demography),” stated TechConnect chief executive officer Mike Cunningham.

Using this data, the AI will provide users with “accurate, key demographic metrics for targeted marketing campaigns, across a range of devices”, a TechConnect statement reads. The company sees SMBs using these metrics for such activities as company expansion, product diversification and recruitment campaigns.

MBRC head of economic intelligence Kerrianne Haggie said, “It has long been a goal of local government to leverage open data, such as anonymised census data, to help their SMBs increase profit and growth, but councils have been limited by the complexity and accessibility of the data.”

“We started talking to companies like TechConnect and told them our biggest challenge was to make the data meaningful, consistent, accessible, and actionable for SMBs, who are the lifeblood of our economy,” Haggie continued. “With Ask Morty we have removed that barrier. Ask Morty also aligns closely with the goals of the council’s Regional Economic Development Strategy (REDS) 2020-2041.”

Ask Morty was designed, tested and launched in less than nine months, with TechConnect’s team, working closely with MBRC. Ask Morty uses a range of AWS services, including AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudWatch and more.

AWS ANZ public sector head of channel and alliance Andrew Winter said, “AWS is proud to support our AWS partner, Tech Connect in developing an artificial intelligence data service for Moreton Bay Regional Council that helps local business make informed decisions to grow their business and ultimately the economy.”

TechConnect ranked 25th in the 2022 CRN Fast50, increasing its sales by 73 percent to $21.1 million in the last financial year. The company touts itself as an expert in cloud migration and modernisation, data and machine learning.

In June 2022, TechConnect launched its ‘warrior program’ managed services offering, a suite of integrated cost, security, support and carbon emission reduction tools. In 2020, TechConnect was the first Australian Advanced Consulting Partner to be awarded the AWS data and analytics competency certification.