If your business is drafting an FY27 business plan -- for a bank, an investor, or just for the partnership's own annual planning discipline -- AI now needs its own section, the same way technology and staffing already get one. Most Australian business plans we've reviewed still treat it as a stray sentence buried in the operations section, if it's mentioned at all, which undersells a genuine part of the cost base and the capability story.
What belongs in this section, and what doesn't
A business plan section on AI is a different document than a budget line-item list or a spend forecast -- it's a narrative artefact meant to be read by someone deciding whether to lend money or invest, not an internal tracking tool. It should answer three things a reader will actually want to know: what AI capability the business currently has, what it's planning to build or adopt over the plan period, and what that's expected to cost and deliver in terms a non-technical reader can follow.
Current state -- a plain-English summary of what's already in use, not a list of tool names a bank manager won't recognise.
Planned investment -- what's coming in the plan period, with a rough cost range, framed as a capability decision not just a software purchase.
Expected impact -- tied to something the reader already cares about (margin, capacity, headcount efficiency), not a vague productivity claim.
Risk and governance -- a short acknowledgement that the business has thought about data handling and oversight, which increasingly matters to lenders and investors asking about this directly.
A worked example section
A Sydney logistics business preparing an FY27 plan for a bank facility renewal wrote: 'The business currently uses AI-assisted dispatch scheduling and customer communication drafting, at a combined cost of approximately $1,400/month. Over FY27 we plan to extend this to invoice processing, an investment of approximately $15,000 in setup cost plus an incremental $400/month in ongoing usage, expected to reduce manual invoice handling time by roughly 60% based on a trial already run on a subset of accounts. All AI-assisted processes remain subject to human review before customer-facing communication is sent.' That's four sentences, plain-English, and answers exactly what a lending manager reviewing the plan would otherwise have to ask about separately.
Why this is worth the effort
Lenders and investors are increasingly asking about AI use directly during due diligence, and a business plan that addresses it proactively, with real numbers, reads as more prepared than one that gets caught flat-footed by the question in a meeting. It also forces useful internal discipline -- writing this section well requires actually knowing your current AI spend and having a genuine plan for the next twelve months, rather than a vague sense that 'we're doing some AI stuff.'
Keeping it honest
Resist the temptation to inflate the expected impact to make the section sound more impressive. A conservative, well-evidenced claim (backed by an actual trial, like the invoice-processing example above) reads as more credible to an experienced reader than an ambitious unverified number, and it protects the business's credibility if the plan gets revisited against actuals a year later.
Where this sits relative to a budget or forecast
This section is not a replacement for a detailed budget line or a forecasting model -- those are internal working documents most readers of a business plan never see. The business plan section is the summary that a busy external reader needs to understand the shape of the decision, with the detailed workings available on request rather than embedded in the plan itself. Keep it to half a page; a business plan section that runs three pages on AI specifically tends to read as either overcompensating or padding, neither of which helps the plan's credibility.
If your business is applying for finance specifically, check what the lender's own template or checklist actually asks for around technology and automation before writing this section from scratch -- some Australian lenders have started asking pointed questions about AI use in due diligence specifically, and matching your section to their actual concerns is more useful than a generic template that misses what they're actually assessing.
Update it annually alongside the rest of the plan, not once and forgotten. A section that still describes last year state of AI use, unchanged, in a plan submitted for renewal signals to an experienced reader that the plan itself has not been properly refreshed either.
If you're drafting a business plan and want help writing this section specifically -- plain-English, evidenced, sized right for the reader -- get in touch through /contact.
