Tourism Australia seeks partner for BI, data and AI work

Tourism Australia (TA) has gone to market for a single specialised partner to run its enterprise business intelligence (BI), data engineering and AI work under a multi-year managed-services contract that could run for up to five years.

The request for quote (RFQ) seeks to engage one partner on an initial two-year term with three one-year extension options, delivering enterprise BI development, data engineering, AI integration and managed operational support. The partner will directly support three business units - Strategy & Research, Digital Marketing, and Finance Transformation.

The engagement is structured as a phased roadmap. The immediate priority is stabilising and optimising TA’s current architecture: remediating, consolidating and securing core foundational data assets - explicitly including Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O) financial pipelines - within TA’s existing Azure and Power BI environments.

That work includes improving data accuracy and pipeline performance and cutting Azure consumption costs by remediating inefficient pipelines, queries and semantic models, a resource-efficiency discipline TA wants carried through to Fabric capacity and AI consumption in the target state.

TA is enforcing a managed-services model under which the partner bears contractual responsibility for resource continuity, with documented handover obligations and team-depth requirements intended to minimise the agency’s internal knowledge-transfer overhead.

Once operational baselines meet agreed service-level agreements (SLAs), the partner will progressively migrate TA’s estate to a unified Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse architecture - consolidating duplicated data assets, resolving dashboard refresh latency, and establishing a native, governed data layer for a secure, cross-dataset conversational analytics (conversational AI) capability.

Migration and AI delivery may proceed in parallel where a given product’s required datasets have already been migrated and validated, so that value is realised progressively rather than deferred until the whole estate is done. TA says the end state materially improves the accessibility, integrity and decision-value of its global data portfolio.

The procurement establishes a single enterprise contract for BI development and platform support, which TA says is designed to maximise its commercial leverage while maintaining operational flexibility across the three units.

To match how the agency operates, each business unit will retain independent task-directing authority and separate budget tracking, with division leads interfacing directly with the vendor’s account manager to manage their own priorities and avoid cross-departmental bottlenecks.

TA says the multi-stream model lets participating divisions deliver critical projects and resolve technical issues under strict SLAs, while securing dedicated technical expertise across Dynamics 365 F&O, the current Azure infrastructure and the incoming Fabric ecosystem.

The RFQ closes at 11:59pm Canberra time on 6 October 2026.