Meet Casey: our cassowary expert
AIAgentsAccessibility
The opportunity
Cassowary conservation in Mission Beach is built on decades of effort — fieldwork, research, local knowledge, and thousands of sightings logged by passionate community members and visitors. But this collective intelligence was hard to access, buried across spreadsheets, paper records, Facebook posts, and memory. The community needed a way to connect with all this information — quickly, intuitively, and without needing to be technical.
Our response
We built Casey to be an always-on AI-powered teammate trained to understand cassowaries.
Casey helps users explore 30+ years of conservation insights using natural language. Ask her about movement patterns, habitat threats, known individuals, or historical interventions — she'll find and explain it. Built specifically for the Mission Beach Cassowaries team, Casey makes local knowledge searchable, shareable, and useful.
As part of the engagement, the internal team was upskilled in AI fundamentals, tools and workflows, empowering them to maintain and expand Casey's brain over time.
Impact
- Made decades of scattered data and knowledge accessible through natural conversation
- Enabled the team to ask complex questions and get contextual answers in seconds
- Boosted local AI literacy and confidence through hands-on training
- Sparked new ways of thinking about storytelling, education, and advocacy
What's next
Casey is always learning and evolving. She's busy converting sightings data into a cohesive children's book on the lives of individual cassowaries — birds so familiar to the community they're practically family. These personalised narratives will help connect kids (and adults) to cassowary conservation through emotion and story.