The lead: South Australia's AI Royal Commission wants to hear from you
South Australia's Royal Commission into Artificial Intelligence released its Scoping Paper and opened submissions on 29 October. The submission page shows the paper open from 29 October and closing on 30 November 2026 at 11:59 pm. The Commission describes this as the first phase of its broad community and industry engagement.
The Commission is not limiting the call to South Australians. It invites submissions from South Australians, other Australians and people with an international perspective on the impacts, risks and opportunities of AI in the state. The paper sets out six themes for discussion:
- AI in society
- better services for people and the state
- growing innovation in South Australia
- managing the economic transition
- education, training and skills of the future
- safe and trusted AI.
Respondents can answer five questions online, upload their own document, type a free response or leave a voicemail. The questions ask whether the six themes capture the right issues, what opportunities and concerns AI raises in South Australia, and what the Commission should focus on. A fifth question asks whether the paper's language is clear and accessible.
Why it matters beyond one state: a Royal Commission's findings can inform legislation, procurement rules and regulator priorities, and other jurisdictions can draw on them. People who run claims, compliance, HR or safety functions see where AI helps and where it fails in ways a policy paper does not. A short submission built on that experience, with no personal or client information in it, is the kind of input the first phase is asking for. The Commission says this phase will help it refine priority themes for later consultation, so later rounds can be expected, but no dates have been published for them.
Microsoft adds accounting skills to Copilot for early users
Microsoft announced on 29 October more than 25 new finance skills and partner plugins across Copilot. The accounting capabilities in Copilot in Excel and Cowork reconcile accounts and prepare reconciling items for review, draft journal entries such as accruals, reclassifications and reversals with checks for balanced entries, and prepare variance reporting. They are available through Microsoft's Frontier early-access program, not to every licence. In Excel, users can choose to start an audit trail when they invoke an accounting capability, which records in the chat history what Copilot changed and why.
Microsoft says that in seven days of limited Insider availability, more than 8,000 unique users invoked the accounting skills more than 44,000 times. That is a usage figure, not an accuracy result. It names Xero, Intuit QuickBooks and Zoho Books among the partners it is working with on plugins, and notes that third-party services may need separate licences or administrator enablement. Australian availability is unconfirmed. For any team trialling it, the audit trail option should be switched on by default, and every journal Copilot drafts still needs the same review and approval as one a person drafted.
Canva releases its own design-editing model
Canva, the Australian design company, introduced Canva Brush on 29 October: a vision-language model built by Canva Research that reads a design, understands how it is put together and makes requested changes, from one line of copy to every slide in a deck. It is powering supported edits in Canva AI for Canva Pro subscribers, with wider availability promised later. Canva says Brush is up to 69% faster and 46% cheaper per edit task than its previous design agent, and that it matched or exceeded the previous setup on most editing tasks in internal testing. Those are Canva's own measurements.
Two details are useful for anyone producing material at work. Everything Brush creates stays fully editable. Canva says it is still working on Brand Kit support, so brand compliance still needs a human check.
Gemini can now edit files inside the chat
Google said on 29 October that the Gemini app can now generate, preview and edit files without leaving the conversation: slide decks that open in Google Slides or download as PPTX or PDF, Sheets trackers, Docs, PDFs, Markdown and text files. PDF editing works on web and mobile; other formats are web only. The feature is available to all Workspace customers and personal accounts wherever the Gemini app is available, and Australia is on Google's published list of supported countries. Google states there is no admin control for this feature beyond turning the Gemini app on or off. Workspace administrators who allow the app have, in effect, allowed file creation inside it.
OpenAI will honour a shared "no training" signal
OpenAI said on 30 October that it will honour a common signal in robots.txt that lets website owners state their preference about their content being used for generative AI training, once, for all participating providers. It aims to implement the signal "in the coming months", so it is not live yet, and its existing crawler controls continue to apply. The signal is described in an individual Internet-Draft dated 30 October, which uses an ordinary robots.txt group keyed by the token _usage_ai-training. An Internet-Draft is a working document, not a standard, and other providers are not shown to be bound by it.
Also in the window
OpenAI's ChatGPT release notes for 30 October say account switching is rolling out to the iOS and Android apps. A person can stay signed in to up to two ChatGPT accounts and switch between them without signing out, and each account keeps its own chats, memory, settings and subscriptions. That makes it easier to keep a work account and a personal account apart on one phone. It does not decide which account a given task belongs in. If your organisation provides a work account, confirm that work material goes there, and check which account is active before pasting anything sensitive.
For how these items fit with the rest of the week, see the weekly review for 26 October to 1 November, and for every edition, AI Updates.
One thing to test this week
Open your organisation's website at /robots.txt, or ask whoever manages the site to send it. Note which AI crawlers it currently names, whether there is any line about AI training, and who decided it. If nobody can say who owns that decision, assign it now, before a shared signal arrives and someone has to choose quickly.
General information only. Not legal, compliance, financial, or professional advice.
TheAICommand. Intelligence, At Your Command.
