Systems for Queensland businesses whose crews, sites and contractors are spread across the state — built to keep working when the connection does not.
Custom software development in Queensland has a geography problem before it has a technology problem. Head office sits in Brisbane or a regional centre. The work is on a mine site in the Bowen Basin, a civil job outside Townsville, a cane block, a cattle property, a depot in Mackay. Software written on the assumption that everyone is at a desk on good internet fails quietly and expensively out there.
Drawn AI is a small custom-build business. Liam and Jacob started it in 2024 out of frustration with systems that made ordinary work harder — Liam from retail operations management, Jacob from mining operations. Jacob's background is the relevant one here: prestarts, shutdowns, contractor inductions, site access, dockets that arrive in a ute three weeks after the work. One of us is based in Queensland and one in Melbourne, and we work remotely across the whole state. There is no office to visit, and we will not describe one we do not have.
Queensland's economy is weighted differently to the southern states: resources and mining services, construction and civil, agriculture, tourism, and a large base of substantial businesses operating well outside the south-east corner. Many run head office functions in one place and the revenue-generating work in five or six others, hundreds of kilometres apart.
That distance is the design constraint, not an afterthought. We assume the network is optional. Anything running on site writes to the device first and syncs when coverage appears, because a system needing four bars to record a prestart gets worked around, and then you have paid for a product that generates no data.
Prestart checks, plant inspections, job sheets, dockets, timesheets, photos and sign-off, captured on the phone or tablet already in someone's pocket. These field and mobile apps complete a full shift with no signal at all and upload in the background when there is one.
Pre-qualification, inductions, competencies, licences, tickets and insurance certificates in one register with expiry dates and reminders, so a contractor moving between three sites is verified once rather than three times. Most mining and resources businesses run this on a spreadsheet and a shared drive until it fails an audit.
Scope, work packs, permits, isolations, labour and plant allocation held against a shutdown rather than scattered across email and print-outs. Progress visible while the shut is running, not reconstructed afterwards from a whiteboard photo.
SWMS, permits, take-5s, hazard reports, incidents and corrective actions in a system that shows who did what and when. Risk and compliance systems matter most where several sites are inspected to different standards.
Weighbridge tickets, delivery dockets, supplier invoices, plant hire sheets and handwritten timesheets read automatically instead of retyped. Document AI is usually the fastest win for a business drowning in scans, because nothing about the field process has to change.
Production, plant utilisation, labour, cost against job and progress by site, in one place and current. Custom dashboards fed straight from site capture end the weekly ritual of three people emailing spreadsheets to a fourth.
A conversation about what is going wrong and what it costs. Then time with people at site level, not only in the boardroom — supervisors and crews decide whether a system gets used or worked around.
We map the paperwork exactly as it exists today, every field on the prestart and every column on the docket, then work out which of them has ever been used for anything. Most forms lose a third of their fields here and lose nothing worth keeping.
We design for the worst conditions in your fleet — the oldest device, the brightest sun, gloves, no signal — not the best. Then it goes in front of a real crew early, on the hardware they actually carry.
Captured data flows into your job costing, payroll, maintenance and accounting systems, so nobody rekeys it. That workflow automation is often where the hours come back. Client data we host sits in Australian regions.
Usage shows what a specification cannot: the screen everyone abandons, the field everyone leaves blank. We keep refining it, and the subscription covers that work.
We do not quote fixed-price projects or bill hourly. Drawn AI works on a monthly subscription, minimum term three months, thirty days' notice to cancel. Scope drives the figure: how many distinct forms and workflows, how many sites, and how many office systems it writes back into. You get a monthly number before committing to anything.
No. One of us is based in Queensland and one in Melbourne, and we work remotely across the state — Brisbane and the south-east, central and north Queensland, and the resources regions. We travel to site when being there will teach us something a video call cannot, which during discovery it usually does. Everything else runs well remotely.
Yes, and that is the starting assumption rather than an extra. The app writes to the device first, so a full shift can be completed with no signal at all — normal on plenty of mining and construction sites. When coverage returns it syncs in the background, and the crew can see what has sent and what is still queued.
Least disruptive when it replaces one form first, not all of them. One crew or one site runs it alongside paper for a fortnight, the paper stops, then the next form follows. Training is usually about fifteen minutes. We would also avoid starting a rollout in the middle of a shutdown, and will say so.
Yes, and a lot of the work that suits us is out there. Regional Queensland operators are usually the ones with the widest gap between what off-the-shelf products assume and how their work actually runs. One practical note: Queensland does not observe daylight saving, so from October to April there is an hour between us and the southern states. It has never been a problem.
In Australian regions — Azure Melbourne and AWS Bedrock Melbourne for what we host. You own your data outright and can export it at any time. Ownership of the software itself is set out in writing before work starts, including what happens if you stop the subscription. Ask us early; email outreach@drawnai.app or use the contact page.
A first conversation costs nothing and usually ends with a clearer idea of what is worth building — sometimes that answer is “not yet”, and we will say so.
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