The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is considering an artificial intelligence coding assistant to support its 800 core developers, aiming to reduce routine programming work and free staff to focus on more complex tasks.
According to a request for tender, the tool would provide code suggestions, bug fixes, automated test scripts, and refactoring across multiple technologies. It would also be capable of translating legacy code such as COBOL into modern languages.
The ATO said the system must integrate with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2019 and 2022, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, and Git repositories. A key requirement is that any code processed cannot be stored or used to train AI models, a safeguard designed to address compliance and privacy concerns.
“The ATO has a complex, multi-technology IT delivery environment, supporting over 800 core developers,” the agency noted. The assistant is intended to help staff “focus on higher value work,” including test planning, application security, and system maintenance.
The initiative reflects the agency’s wider push to embed AI across its operations. The ATO has identified five enterprise-level use cases, such as fraud detection, client risk profiling, and document processing.
At the recent AI Innovation Showcase in Canberra, ATO assistant commissioner for data science Ying Yang explained the agency’s three-tier AI framework: scaled machine learning (systems that mimic instruction), augmentation (generative AI working alongside humans), and intelligent automation (AI handling judgment and creative tasks).
“Humans and AI become peers, and they contribute to each other from their own strengths,” Yang said of the augmentation stage.
