How can AI help unlock the potential of skilled migrants?
Adelaide business Vocare is using artificial intelligence to tackle a workforce challenge with implications for skilled migration, productivity and economic growth.
Founded by Adelaide entrepreneur, Seshnie Taylor, Vocare uses AI-powered voice analysis to help skilled migrants who speak English as a second language improve the clarity and confidence of their spoken communication.
The idea emerged from a challenge Taylor observed in the frontline care sector, where skilled and qualified workers could face communication barriers despite having valuable experience and expertise.
The platform uses machine learning to identify articulation challenges and provide targeted exercises to help users improve their spoken clarity.
But the opportunity goes beyond communication.
Australia relies on skilled migration to help meet workforce needs, yet skilled migrants can still face barriers to fully applying their qualifications and experience in the Australian workforce.
Technology that helps reduce some of those barriers could create benefits on both sides.
For skilled migrants, it can support confidence and participation in the Australian workforce.
For employers, it can help unlock an existing pool of skills and experience at a time when many industries continue to face workforce pressures.
And for the broader economy, greater workforce participation can support productivity and growth.
Vocare’s development also points to another part of the story: the environment in which ideas like this can grow.
The business received 300 hours of machine learning engineering expertise through a grant from the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) to help develop its core machine learning engine.
Based at Lot Fourteen in Adelaide, AIML sits at the heart of the city’s growing innovation ecosystem - where research, technology, entrepreneurship and industry come together to build the capabilities of tomorrow. It reflects what makes Adelaide an Innovation City: a compact, connected environment where the people, capabilities and organisations needed to drive serious innovation are already within reach. For emerging businesses, access to this kind of ecosystem can help turn a local challenge into a commercial opportunity.
Vocare already has more than 200 users and is aiming to reach 1,000 by the end of 2026.
Its ambitions extend much further.
Taylor’s longer-term goal is to support one million skilled migrants, with markets including New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom presenting similar workforce and migration challenges.
It raises a broader question for Adelaide:
How many global opportunities could begin with solving a challenge experienced locally?
Adelaide’s innovation story isn’t only about advanced technology, research institutions or infrastructure.
It’s also about what businesses do with them.
When research capability, technology and entrepreneurship come together around economic challenges, the result can be a solution that supports people, businesses and productivity at the same time.
Vocare is one example of that potential.
For Adelaide, the opportunity is not only to develop new technologies, but to create the condition for local idea to grow, scale and compete in global markets.