ORCA Opti Named Finalist for Best Use of Agentic AI at the 2026 Australian AI Awards

We're proud to share that ORCA Opti has been named a finalist in the Best Use of Agentic AI (Start Up) category at the 2026 Australian AI Awards, presented by AI Daily, a Momentum Media brand.

This year's program spans individual and group categories, from researchers, consultants and engineers through to industry innovators in healthcare, legal, financial services, defence, energy and the public sector. Being shortlisted in the agentic AI category, alongside some of the most interesting startups building with AI agents in Australia, means a great deal to our team.

Agents that do the work, and leave the evidence behind

Agentic AI is the shift from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions: drafting, filing, updating records, moving work from one step to the next. For regulated teams, that shift raises the obvious question. If an agent can act, who decided what it's allowed to do, and how would you prove it later?

That question is the centre of how we build. In ORCA Opti, doing the work and producing the evidence are the same activity, and our agents are designed around it:

• Automation starts from your own procedures. Choose "Compile to automation" on a written procedure and ORCA proposes an agent before anything is created. It shows which steps can be automated now, which need a person, and where no tool exists, so the gaps are stated up front rather than discovered later.
• Least privilege, derived from the procedure. The proposed agent is granted only the tools the automatable steps need, and it starts with a conservative posture: manual start, act on reads, approve before writes. Nothing is created until a person approves it.
• Every action checked before it runs. AI Guardian inspects what an agent is about to do and can block the action or require human approval for higher-risk calls, such as sending data to an external recipient.
• It runs where your work already lives. ORCA operates inside your own Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenancy, hosted in Australia, and your data is never used to train external models.

The result is agentic AI that a tech team, a compliance lead and a board can all say yes to.

Our fellow finalists

Congratulations to everyone shortlisted in Best Use of Agentic AI (Start Up):

• AgenticScale.AI
• Agents for Humanity by Enterprise Monkey
• Backable
• Cordexa
• Eolas Solutions
• Ground Effect
• LegalScout
• Sparrow XPL
• Synap AI

It's a strong field, and a sign of how quickly Australian startups are moving from AI experiments to AI that carries real work.

What happens next

Winners will be announced at the Australian AI Awards gala on Friday 30 October 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Sydney. We'll share the result here.

If you'd like to see how governed agents could work in your own organisation, book a walkthrough with our team.

Read more: Australian AI Awards 2026 Winners and Finalists (AI Daily)