Your aXcelerate Day 2026 Replay: What's New and What's Next

Built for what's next

This past year has asked more of every training organisation. New standards. AI accelerating what's possible. Sharper budgets. Harder decisions. That's the backdrop for aXcelerate Day 2026, and the thread running through everything below: aXcelerate keeps evolving with you.

If you are interested in learning more about any of the features below, let us know via this form.

A day guided by HEART

Our CEO David O’Rourke opened the day by laying out the year the sector's had: new standards to meet, the pace of AI, cyber threats, funding changes and economic uncertainty that leaves less room for guesswork. His message was that aXcelerate's job is to keep pace with that shift, from the platform's foundations through to how it's kept secure and how it helps clients grow. He closed on what doesn't change: the reason any of this matters is the people coming through your doors, and the businesses and communities they go on to build.

From there, Justin (CTO) walked through harness engineering, aXcelerate's approach to building AI into the development process itself. Every engineering change now moves through the same rigorous cycle, with human review throughout and a sign-off gate before anything reaches production. He framed the thinking behind it simply: maximising value, minimising vanity.

aXcelerate AI 

Since we started our AI journey, the focus has been on shipping AI features that solve real problems rather than AI for its own sake: question generation, AI-assisted marking, template generation,  AI help drawing on the same knowledge base as our support team, log book insights that flag learners who might need support on placement, and a learner support agent offering 24/7 help grounded in your own content.

This year, just as much work has gone into what you don't see: security hardening, permission-aware AI access, and migrating our AI features onto Australian-based infrastructure, so your data stays onshore now and as our AI capability keeps expanding.

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Product Manager Brendan Shand announced that this work has laid the foundation for aXcelerate AI, our next-generation AI assistant, currently in closed beta. It lets you ask plain-language questions about your own account data, with every response respecting your existing user permissions and staying within Australia. It's an early step toward AI that can help take work off your plate, and more will land over the year ahead.

Learn more about AI in aXcelerate →

The Audit Log

In a compliance-driven industry, the question "who changed what, and when?" can make or break an audit or internal review. It's not a question you want to be guessing at.

The Audit Log is built to put those governance and accountability doubts to rest. It automatically captures key details any time a record is created, updated or deleted – who made the change, when they made it, and the specifics of what changed, all in a format that can't be erased or manipulated after the fact.

Learn more about the Audit Log →

The Client Portal

The Client Portal gives your business clients, from corporate first aid customers to a real estate CPD cohort, a self-serve way to enrol staff, pay invoices and pull reports. 

"We have 33 clients using the portal. They've completed 190 bookings themselves, saving my team around 32 hours of manual data entry."

Pooja Dhaga, Harness Energy

For many RTOs, corporate bookings are a delicate balance: you want to give your clients a level of self-service and oversight, but not at the cost of compliance or control.

This year's Client Portal releases are all about striking that balance:

• A new catalogue view lets clients browse and book into courses they may not have known you offered, turning the portal from a passive bookings tracker into an active revenue driver.
• Surfacing invoices to view and pay directly, complete with your existing payment gateway, cuts out the back-and-forth of emailed copies and status checks.
• Custom report views let you share exactly the data clients need, in real time, without sacrificing security or spending hours on manual exports.

And we're not stopping here. Coming next: live chat for a direct line to your admin team, and a unit of competency matrix so clients can see at a glance which staff meet regulatory requirements, and which need to be re-booked. We have an exciting roadmap for the Client Portal over the year ahead, focused on features that give your clients more flexibility and you more peace of mind, all while keeping you firmly in control.

Learn more about the Client Portal →

Student Management System (SMS)

Our Student Management System session came back to one theme: the SMS is where your most sensitive data lives, so it has to be the part of the platform you worry about least. That means continued investment in compliance and security, including retaining our ISO 27001 certification and doing as much proactive work as we can to keep you ahead of the curve.

Product Manager Jack Christensen shared that a lot of this year's SMS work came straight from customer feedback, and it's the kind that quietly gives you time back:

• units auto-completing with future dates
• workshop and group duplication visibility
• digitally marked attendance that prints properly
• better logging for organisation notes
• Agreements now support document uploads and mandatory fields, so funding evidence is captured at the point it's needed rather than chased later

Coming next: Restricted Portfolio Types, so you can decide who can see sensitive learner documents instead of relying on everyone knowing what they shouldn't open; Google-powered address validation to stop bad data getting into your records in the first place; a Print Attendance refresh with global presets and clearer configuration; and a Workshop Types refresh, following on from the Workshop List and Types Lists.‍

Learn more about aXcelerate's SMS →

From AVETMISS to the STARS

VET Data Streamlining (VDS) is the biggest reporting change on the horizon: national reporting moves from an annual, static submission to transactional, event-based validation. We've been closely involved in shaping that transition, working directly with the VDS project team so the changes reflect how RTOs actually operate, not just how the standard reads on paper. DEWR joined us on the day to walk through what's ahead for VET activity reporting and how to plan for it.

Fee-for-service providers can opt in to start transitioning from October 2026 (non-FFS: 2027 to 2028), and we're building the integration now, informed by that ongoing work with DEWR.

Work-Based Learning and the aXcelerate App

Product Manager Max Tranter's session on practical learning across mobile delivery and on-the-job training carried this year's theme: stronger foundations for faster work.

The aXcelerate App brings what used to be two tools, the Supervisor App and the Legacy Trainer App, into one place for assessment marking, attendance, calendar and workshop and class management. Offline support is built in for workshops, classes and assessment marking, which matters when training happens on a beach, a worksite, or anywhere the signal drops out. More than 16,000 assessments are now marked through the aXcelerate App each month. Coming next: a self-attendance kiosk, quiz support and a new dashboard.

Learn more about the aXcelerate App →

Work-Based Learning (WBL) replaces paper logbooks with a digital one, so evidence from placements arrives as it happens in one central location, rather than in a pile of paper at the end. Work-Based Learning is now supporting 3,000 placements across 12 industries, with over a million pages saved this year alone. Work-Based Learning's major release this year was Milestones, which lets you define the criteria a learner needs to hit while on placement and track their progress alongside their classroom learning. Coming next: bulk placement creation, Milestones in the mobile apps and a supervisor checklist.

Learn more about Work-Based Learning →

Learning Management System and the learner experience

Product Manager Liam Robertson's LMS session focused on the planned focus areas for the LMS looking forward, including: marking, authoring, learner readiness and analytics.

Covering recent additions, marking is where the biggest shift has landed. The AI Marking Assistant now generates 160,000+ suggestions a month, so assessors start from a draft rather than a blank page. An updated PDF viewer means essay-style submissions can be more easily accessed within the LMS, without downloading a file or switching tabs. Coming next: a side-by-side PDF marking view and a dedicated Marking Hub. Additionally, Surveys can now be added directly into your Learning Plans with controls to set whether they are required or optional.

On the learner experience side, the Learner Portal now supports per-domain sub-branding, and accessibility work is progressing toward WCAG standards. Learner Onboarding has grown to support editing published forms, in-form payments and rich content in descriptions, and is now used by more than 240 clients, having supported over 130,000 courses since launch. 

Learn more about aXcelerate’s LMS →

Skills: workforce competency management

When competency records live across spreadsheets, paper certificates and inboxes, gaps can easily go unnoticed. Skills, aXcelerate's competency and authorisation management product, pulls that picture into one place for RTOs, enterprise clients and labour hire providers.

Product Manager Mark Gilmore introduced it as a way for workforce compliance and WHS teams to answer one question: what tasks can this worker do, right now? Skills backs that answer with audit-ready evidence, flags expiries before they lapse, and surfaces gaps while there's still time to close them.

This year's releases sharpen the answer to that question. Approval requests now land in a single inbox instead of scattering across inboxes, a consolidated competency list gives you one view of your configuration rather than several, and a training needs analysis (TNA) matrix shows you where the workforce gaps are before someone's rostered onto a task they're not cleared for. A contact merge tool and further security work round it out. Coming next: extended TNA across multiple roles, offline mobile credentials and detailed history logs.

Learn more about Skills →

aXcelerate Academy

New staff shouldn't have to learn aXcelerate by trial and error. Academy is aXcelerate's answer: self-paced, role-specific courses built on our own LMS, covering everything from Admin Essentials to Trainer Essentials. Coming up: Skills courses for admins and managers, plus CRICOS and state funding courses.

Enrolment in current courses is open online now.

Enrol here →

Thank you to our community

Thank you to everyone who joined us for aXcelerate Day 2026, and to everyone building the roadmap alongside us.

Why we do this hasn't changed. The people walking through your doors are developing skills that build better lives, better businesses and better communities. Together, we're connecting learning to livelihood. That's why we're building for what's next.