CASE STUDIES

What happens when you think with AI, not just about AI?

National Security and Resilience Case Study

As Chair of the Institute for Integrated Economic Research – Australia, Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn (Retd) used Dragonfly Thinking to reassess national resilience insights and identify new strategic options, highlighting its value in helping human teams comprehend and act on complex systemic risks.

“We used Dragonfly Thinking to reassess work from the Institute for Integrated Economic Research – Australia (IIER-A)’s National Resilience Project. Integrating Dragonfly into our project team enabled us to gain a deeper understanding of systemic risks and vulnerabilities, and to identify creative strategies to strengthen national resilience. The system’s structured approach supports the kind of thinking that human teams often find difficult to sustain unaided.”

— Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO (Retd), Board Chair, IIER-A

APS Capability Reinvestment Fund Pilot

Earlier this year, Dragonfly Thinking became the first homegrown GenAI system to be piloted by the Australian Public Service.

The pilot was delivered in partnership with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), AI CoLab, and the APS Academy.

Why did this pilot matter?
Policy teams are under pressure to make better decisions faster, with fewer resources and more uncertainty.

Dragonfly’s AI tools helped:

  • Risk, Finance and Policy teams surface blind spots across agencies

  • Strategy teams develop no-regret actions in live scenario exercises

  • Digital divisions compress weeks of research into days

Anthea Roberts speaking for RRR AI Pilot Showcase in front of audience

  • “The holy grail of scenario planning is finding no-regret actions. Enter Dragonfly.”

    – Dr Huw McKay, Former Chief Economist, BHP, now Visiting Fellow at ANU’s Crawford School

  • “Dragonfly’s perspectives analysis lets small risk teams do what used to take much bigger ones—and prevents over-investing in outdated risks.”

    – Chloe Tallentire, Australian public sector risk policy advisor

  • “Dragonfly Thinking helped me weigh short-, medium- and long-term trade-offs in Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP).”

    – James Balzar, Australian climate and sustainability policy practitioner

  • “Dragonfly expanded the depth of my research by at least 3× and cut discovery time from weeks to days (50–60% reduction).”

    – Eric Nguyen, digital strategist and ACS executive committee member

  • “AI Auto Generate helps to reduce the risk of blind spots in policy analysis.”

    – DISR policy maker

  • “We need to see AI not just as a tool we use, but as a teammate we co-create with.”

    – Anthea Roberts, Founder of Dragonfly Thinking

How Public Sector Teams Used Dragonfly AI to Think Smarter

Scenario Planning → Strategic Action

Dr Huw McKay used Dragonfly’ Scenarios and his own “Escher Prompt” to map four divergent futures and surface no-regret strategic moves for a multinational company. What normally takes weeks? Done in hours.

Supply Chain Security

Eric Nguyen used Dragonfly to develop a structured, high-impact strategy that multiplied the depth of research (x3) while reducing discovery time by 50–60%. More importantly, he changed the way he worked and thought.

Risk Foresight at Scale

Chloe Tallentire from the Department of Finance used Dragonfly to help build an AI-powered foresight platform to help small agencies surface hidden risks and scale Comcover support to 170+ members.

Blind Spot Detection in Policy

DISR coordinated three live pilots testing Dragonfly on complex challenges, from data centres to hypothetical technology bans. Dragonfly helped teams think outside the box and surface novel information and insights.

Energy Transition Pathways

Climate advisor James Balzer used Dragonfly’s Perspectives view to weigh SDG-aligned trade-offs for Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition bridging predictive modelling and prescriptive strategy.

Key Takeaways

Every team found the same thing, Dragonfly helped them think better and faster. To unlock the full potential of AI in government, we need a mindset shift: from automation to augmentation, from prompts to partnerships, from treating AI as a tool to treating it as a thinking partner.


“We think of much of our work as decision making support. We ask: is there a way we can more effectively help leaders in the region and Australian policymakers alike? Can we get a better result by teaming our analysts with Dragonfly? We think the answer is an emphatic yes.
The core purpose of this tool is to grapple with complexity, based on a rigorous analytical framework—is what felt valuable to us and what has kept us engaged. 


Dragonfly is the kind of powerful tool we need to build into business as usual, that we need to help us make tough decisions in tough times. Simple experiments quickly showed Dragonfly’s value: a rapid analysis product on middle-income traps in two hours that would have previously taken us three days, for instance. Organisations that harness AI are the organisations that are going to remain on the forefront of development cooperation.”

Eric Nguyen
Australian Computer Society, Branch Committee Member

"What makes Dragonfly Thinking unique is its use of Generative AI to guide deep thinking through clear, structured frameworks. Even during the pilot stage, using the platform has helped me identify the best angles of an issue, develop strong hypotheses, and gain stakeholder buy-in for effective problem solving. Highly recommended."