The Australian Taxation Office’s deputy commissioner of smarter data Marek Rucinski says he can measure the return on his team’s efforts to deploy artificial intelligence across the Australian economy to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Few private company or public sector executives are as open as Rucinski in discussing the financial spoils available from increasingly smart software, and he says strong controls are needed to make sure humans remain a crucial part of the system, as the bots get more powerful.