Why 2026 marks a turning point for transformative, whole-person care
Liquid CEO Fiona Armstrong explains how the real power of AI will be demonstrated, not by helping people find services more quickly, but allowing services to organise themselves around a person’s life.

Digital health
Human-centred design

A close-up of one person’s hand resting gently on another person’s shoulder, suggesting comfort or reassurance in an indoor setting.
For the past year I’ve been speaking and writing a lot about AI adoption, trying to cut through both the hype and the fear to help health and government organisations find a safe, practical starting point.

The efficiency gains are obvious. AI can summarise, draft, search, classify. It can shave time off processes and lighten administrative tasks.

That’s useful, but it’s incremental.

My eureka moment didn’t come from asking what AI could automate. It came from asking what assumption it could overturn.

For centuries, our operating norm has been this: when people need help, they approach government and health organisations where services sit behind organisational walls, waiting to be accessed.

Services are designed largely as “one size fits most”. If someone’s needs cross agency, program or team boundaries, it’s on them to join the dots, to navigate eligibility rules, retell their story, and coordinate their own help.

Even in digital government 2.0 and 3.0, we’ve mostly digitised that same model. We’ve made services easier to access, sometimes bundled related journeys, occasionally reached out proactively. But fundamentally, the burden of interpretation has stayed with the individual.

AI has matured a lot in recent years, so I started experimenting more deeply with AI. Moving beyond prompting it to draft documents, but giving it complex, messy, human scenarios.

A cancer diagnosis layered with job insecurity.

A mental health crisis intersecting with housing instability.

A person juggling care responsibilities, chronic illness and financial stress.

Instead of asking “what service applies?”, I explored if the AI could interpret the situation, understand the needs and the cognitive capacity. To surface relevant supports. To sequence them. To explain them appropriately for personal comprehension. To connect disparate programs that had never been designed to sit together.

And it could. Not perfectly. Not autonomously. But well enough to expose something profound: interpretation and contextualisation, the very things that have prevented whole-person service design at scale, were no longer insurmountable barriers.

For decades, personalisation and proactivity were constrained by complexity.

Understanding a person’s context required time, expertise and coordination that simply didn’t scale. That’s why integrated care pilots required heroic effort and why, in part, whole-of-government reform has moved slowly.

But now AI is fundamentally good at making sense of complexity. Give it multiple sources and it can join the dots. It can validate, simplify and sequence. It can translate policy language into lived reality. It can connect services that were never designed to talk to each other.

And that’s when it clicked. The real transformation isn’t that AI helps people find services more quickly. It’s that it allows services to organise themselves around a person’s life.

If interpretation can be scaled, the model flips. The long-standing norm, that people must navigate fragmented systems, no longer has to hold.

Instead of waiting for individuals to identify what they need and where to go, agentic AI can orchestrate services proactively around their situation.

In that moment, AI stopped being only a productivity tool in my mind. It became the enabler of a fundamentally different relationship between people and the systems designed to support them.

We were talking about redesigning the social contract. It’s not something we can achieve overnight, but it is something we can start today.

And that’s what we are doing. Here at Liquid, we’re developing the concept of LifeDesign to show how a safe, human-centred approach to AI can create an integrated LifeHub for all Australians.

Fiona has over 25 years expertise leading the transformation of social outcomes internationally. With 20 years leading whole-of-government reform, her speciality is transforming complex ecosystems and sensitive issues, including mental health and ageing. She has championed the adoption of a human-centred, digitally enabled approach across government and is passionate about realising better outcomes for everyone.

Fiona is CEO of Liquid, a strategic design & digital transformation consultancy, where she inspires and delivers the best possible futures for clients and their customers.

Connect with Fiona via LinkedIn

Why 2026 marks a turning point for transformative, whole-person care

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