Collective Campus vs MavensAI: Which Fits Your Team?

Choosing an AI partner in Australia is harder than it looks, mostly because "AI partner" can mean very different things. Some providers build AI tools and agents for you. Some run executive strategy workshops. Some build the habits, skills and team behaviours that determine whether anyone actually uses AI well six months later. MavensAI and Collective Campus both work with Australian organisations on AI, but they sit in different places in that spectrum.

This article compares the two fairly. Everything said about MavensAI comes from their own public pages, and is attributed that way. Where their site does not say something, this article says so rather than guessing. The aim is to help you decide whether one of them, both, or neither is the right fit, and to give you a way of testing any provider you speak to.

Short answer

MavensAI is a Sydney-based AI implementation and solutions service, and its site says it offers executive AI strategy workshops, custom AI agents and enablement. Collective Campus is a capability building company that helps teams build high-performance culture through AI training, adoption programmes, governance, design thinking and team behaviours. Choose MavensAI if you want AI built for you. Choose Collective Campus if you want your people to build the capability themselves.

At a glance comparison table

The table below compares the two across the factors buyers usually care about. MavensAI entries reflect what their public site says. Where the site is silent, the table says so.

Who MavensAI is

Per their own public site, MavensAI describes itself as "a dedicated AI Implementation and Solutions service, created by the team behind Digital Mavens and Now Communications Group." The site says the team is Sydney-based, with over 17 years of experience guiding Australian businesses through digital and technological transformation.

What their site says they offer

Their homepage organises the offer into four areas:

• AI Consulting. Their site describes C-level strategy workshops, AI education sessions for senior leaders, and tailored assessments of business readiness, with help mapping opportunities, prioritising use cases and developing roadmaps.
• Custom AI Solutions. Their site says they design and build AI solutions around a client's needs, data and industry, including custom AI agents that act as "domain experts" within a business, integrated with existing systems and databases.
• Training and Enablement. Their site describes hands-on training, tailored enablement plans, upskilling sessions and onboarding support, plus guidance on ongoing model training and refinement.
• Ongoing AI Support. Their site says "AI is not set-and-forget" and describes technical maintenance, refinement and continuous enablement.

The site also points to a sister business, Digital Mavens, which it describes as an ecommerce and web development agency. That is useful context: MavensAI sits within a group with a long digital delivery background.

Their executive AI strategy workshops

The most detailed public page is their AI Strategy Workshop for executives and business owners. Their site says these are structured, interactive working sessions with a leadership team, combining education, discussion and strategic planning, tailored to the organisation.

Their site lists typical participants as CEOs and founders, executive leadership teams, strategy and innovation leaders, business unit leaders and technology leaders, and says workshops typically involve 2 to 12 participants.

Topics their site says they can cover include an introduction to AI for executives, capability and readiness discovery, strategic business impact, AI agent solutions, strategy development using the MavensAI strategic framework, ideation and use case development, roadmapping and prioritisation, and ethics, governance, risk and security.

Their site describes three formats: a half-day workshop, a full-day workshop, and multi-day workshops for deeper strategic work such as roadmap development and working sessions with different internal teams. It also says strategy recommendations or detailed follow-up presentations can be developed from the outcomes. Specific durations for these formats are on their page and are not repeated here, so check their site directly if that matters to you.

Examples they publish

Their site features a showcase including a tenders and pricing portal. Their site says it used knowledge-based AI agents connected to company documents, automated analysis of multi-format files, and a custom online interface to reduce the time needed to respond to tenders. The site describes results in qualitative terms such as faster response times and a higher volume of tenders completed. It also lists a Shopify Plus migration for Toys R Us Australia under the Digital Mavens brand.

Published thinking

Their blog includes a multi-part series called "Popping The Bonnet on AI" that uses a vehicle analogy to explain AI for business leaders, including a part on governance described as the "new AI governance road rules." Other posts on their site cover how AI is changing search and websites, and what Shopify's internal AI mandate means for business leaders.

What their public site does not say

To keep this comparison honest, here is what the research did not find on their public pages: named facilitators, accreditation or credentials of workshop leaders, a dedicated programme for building team behaviours or culture, a measurement framework for adoption, a stated list of Australian delivery cities beyond Sydney as their base, or detailed information on online delivery. That does not mean these things do not exist. It means a buyer should ask.

Who Collective Campus is

Collective Campus is a capability building company for teams. Its positioning is "Building high-performance culture and teams for the AI world." It was founded in Melbourne by Steve Glaveski and Sean Qian, and it has done innovation work since 2015 and AI work since 2022.

It is not an AI-only business. The programmes span AI training and adoption, design thinking, customer experience, lean startup and product sprints, agile, productivity, psychological safety, critical thinking, AI governance and high-performance teams. The common thread is capability: the skills, habits and shared ways of working that let a team keep getting better after the facilitator leaves.

How the work is delivered

Steve still leads flagship workshops. The workshops are known for their energy and entertainment, a reflection of founder Steve Glaveski's background in stand-up comedy and bands, combined with practical tools that participants can use the next morning. Every programme is tailored after a scoping call, so there is no fixed package to buy off a shelf.

The AI programme family

For AI specifically, Collective Campus runs a connected set of options. The AI programmes overview covers the range, including the 90 day AI adoption sprint for embedding AI into everyday work, AI champions to build internal advocates, a leadership team AI immersion for executives, and AI governance. There is also online AI training for distributed teams and AI design sprints for working on real problems.

The broader capability set

Because AI use depends on the human system around it, Collective Campus also works on high-performance teams, psychological safety, critical thinking, design thinking, customer experience, agile, productivity and innovation capability. You can read more on the about page and browse the case studies and guides.

Deep comparison

The two organisations are not direct mirror images, so a fair comparison needs to look at the dimensions where the differences actually matter to a buyer. Seven are covered below.

Dimension 1: Approach

MavensAI. Based on their public site, the approach is solution-led. The homepage frames the business around "AI Implementation and Solutions," and the workshop page positions executive sessions as the front door to a roadmap and, where relevant, to building something. Their site says they focus on "AI education workshops, use case design, pilot implementation, and industry-specific solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes." The logic is: understand where AI can create value, pick the use cases, then implement and support them.

That is a coherent and often very effective approach, especially for organisations that know they want a specific tool, agent or automation and need someone to build it properly. A business drowning in tender responses or policy questions may well want a working agent rather than a workshop.

Collective Campus. The approach is capability-led. The question is less "what should we build" and more "what do our people need to be able to do, and what conditions make them do it consistently." That includes AI skills, but also the team behaviours that decide whether those skills turn into results: willingness to experiment, honest conversations about what is not working, sound judgement about AI output, and clear boundaries on responsible use.

How to think about it. These approaches are complementary more than competing. A custom AI tool delivered into a team that does not trust it, does not know how to question its output, or does not feel safe admitting confusion will underperform. Equally, a highly capable team with no useful tools will hit a ceiling. The honest question is which constraint is binding in your organisation today: the tool or the capability.

Dimension 2: Breadth

MavensAI. Within AI, their site shows reasonable breadth: strategy, education, custom agents, enablement and ongoing support. Beyond AI, the group connection to Digital Mavens extends into ecommerce and web development. Their site lists no programmes on team behaviours, design thinking, agile or related capability areas.

Collective Campus. Breadth sits in the capability dimension. Alongside AI, the programme range covers design thinking, lean startup and product sprints, agile, productivity, customer experience, psychological safety and critical thinking. It does not build software or custom agents as a core offer, and buyers who need that should say so early.

Why breadth matters. If AI adoption is the only thing you are solving, breadth is less important than depth in the thing you need. If AI is one part of a wider shift in how teams work, such as moving faster on customer problems, running smaller experiments, or rebuilding how a leadership team makes decisions, then a provider that can connect those threads reduces the number of vendors and the number of frameworks your people have to learn.

Dimension 3: Depth of behaviour change

This is where the two differ most, so it is worth being precise.

MavensAI. Their public site describes education, hands-on training, tailored enablement plans, upskilling sessions and onboarding support, plus guidance on ongoing refinement. These are real enablement activities. What the site does not describe is a structured approach to behaviour change in teams: habit formation, norms, psychological safety, or how to sustain new ways of working over months. For a tool deployment, that may be entirely appropriate. Training staff to use and monitor an agent is a different task from changing how a team thinks and works.

Collective Campus. Behaviour change is the centre of the work. The 90 day AI adoption sprint is designed around embedding AI into real workflows over time rather than delivering a single event. AI champions create peer-level advocates so adoption does not depend on the external facilitator. The work on psychological safety addresses a quiet blocker in AI adoption: people who stay silent about confusion or errors because it feels risky to admit them.

What the evidence base looks like. No invented numbers are offered here. The more useful point is a question you can put to any provider: what happens in the weeks after the session, and who is responsible for it? A one-off workshop can lift awareness. Sustained change usually needs repetition, practice on real work, visible leadership behaviour and peers who can help. Ask each provider to show how their programme provides those things.

Dimension 4: Leadership involvement

MavensAI. Their executive workshop is built around the leadership team. Their site says it is "designed specifically for business leaders," with typical participants including CEOs, founders and executive teams. The small group size their site states, 2 to 12 participants, suits a focused strategy conversation where everyone in the room has decision authority. This is a genuine strength for organisations whose first need is executive alignment on where AI fits.

Collective Campus. Leadership involvement is built into several programmes, notably the leadership team AI immersion. The reasoning is that team behaviour follows what leaders model. If executives visibly use AI, ask good questions about its output and treat mistakes as learning, teams follow. If leaders only mandate adoption, it tends to stall. There is more on structuring this in the guide to running an AI workshop for your leadership team.

A practical note. Both providers engage leadership. The difference is what happens next. A strategy workshop can leave executives with a clear roadmap. Whether the wider organisation then picks it up depends on enablement, champions and team conditions, which is where the two offers diverge. Some organisations will reasonably start with strategy and add capability later. Others will find that capability work surfaces the strategic questions on its own.

Dimension 5: AI and risk

MavensAI. Governance is represented on their site in two ways. The executive workshop lists "Ethics, Governance, Risk & Security" as a topic, covering governance policies, regulatory considerations and organisational risk management. And their blog includes a part of the "Popping The Bonnet on AI" series framed around "the new AI governance road rules." Their site also lists a corporate policy AI agent among its solutions, suggesting an interest in using AI to help people navigate internal policy. The depth of their governance work, such as framework design or policy drafting, is not stated on their public site.

Collective Campus. There is a dedicated AI governance programme and a wider AI governance offer, alongside governance themes woven through adoption work. The emphasis is on making governance workable for the people doing the daily work, rather than leaving it as a policy document no one reads. Critical thinking training sits next to this, because one of the most practical risk controls is staff who know when to doubt AI output.

Sector context. Risk expectations differ by sector. Regulated environments carry specific obligations, and it is worth checking provider experience in your sector. Collective Campus has dedicated pages for government, financial services and legal AI training. For any provider, ask who in the delivery team has worked in your regulatory context and how they handle sensitive data in the learning environment.

One distinction worth drawing. There is a difference between governance as a policy deliverable and governance as a team capability. The first answers "what are our rules." The second answers "will people follow them, spot problems and raise concerns." Most organisations need both. Check which one each provider is really offering.

Dimension 6: Measurement

MavensAI. Their site references "measurable business outcomes" and describes monitoring metrics such as accuracy, customer satisfaction and resolution rates when deploying an AI agent, along with regular updates and periodic reviews. That is measurement of tool performance, which is the right thing to measure when you deploy a tool. Their site does not state how they measure workshop impact or capability change on the people side.

Collective Campus. Measurement is shaped on the scoping call around what the organisation is trying to change. No statistics are claimed here. The honest framing is that capability measurement works best when it tracks leading indicators of behaviour, such as how often teams use AI on real work, the quality of how they check outputs, and whether experiments are being run and shared, alongside the business outcomes leaders care about. The case studies page shows how engagements have been described.

What to ask any provider. Before signing, agree what "working" looks like. A good provider will help you define a small number of indicators up front, a baseline, and a point at which you review. Be cautious of any provider, including either of these two, that promises large percentage gains without knowing your starting point.

Dimension 7: Facilitation style

MavensAI. Their site describes "interactive" sessions that combine education, discussion and strategic planning, with structured brainstorming for use case development and optional pre and post work. Who facilitates is not named on their public site, so a buyer should ask who will actually be in the room and what their background is.

Collective Campus. Workshops are known for energy and entertainment. Founder Steve Glaveski comes from stand-up comedy and bands, and that shows in how sessions are run. Steve leads flagship workshops, and the emphasis is on practical tools participants can use the next morning. This matters more than it sounds: AI training that people find dull gets forgotten, and training that people enjoy gets discussed in the corridor, which is where adoption actually spreads. Energy is not a substitute for substance, but it does help substance stick.

Fit consideration. A small executive strategy session and a room of fifty team members need different facilitation. Ask each provider to describe how they adapt to your audience and to show examples of how they handle quiet participants, sceptics and people with very different starting skills.

Dimension 8: Fit for Australian organisations

MavensAI. Their site says the team is Sydney-based and has guided Australian businesses through digital transformation for 17 years. That is relevant local experience, particularly for Sydney organisations that value a nearby partner and for businesses already in the digital and ecommerce ecosystem. Their showcase includes an ASX-listed retailer under the Digital Mavens brand. Whether they deliver in other Australian cities, and whether they offer online delivery, is not stated on their public site.

Collective Campus. Founded in Melbourne, with delivery across Australian cities. Local pages exist for high-performance teams in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and for design thinking in Sydney and Melbourne. Canberra work is available for public sector teams. Online AI training supports distributed teams across time zones.

Practical questions for any Australian buyer. Where are facilitators based, and who travels? How is the content grounded in Australian regulation and workplace norms? Can the provider work across your sites? For government and regulated sectors, how do they handle security and data residency in the learning environment? Location is not everything, but familiarity with the Australian context does save time.

Who each suits

No provider is right for everyone. These lists are meant to be used honestly, including by readers who conclude that MavensAI is the better fit.

Choose MavensAI if...

• You already know you want a specific AI tool or agent built, such as a policy assistant or a tender response system, and you want a team that builds and supports it.
• Your first need is a focused leadership strategy session, with a small group of decision-makers, producing a roadmap and prioritised use cases.
• You value a Sydney-based team with a long digital transformation background and a sister agency that can handle web or ecommerce work.
• You want enablement tied to a specific solution, with staff trained on the tool you have deployed and ongoing technical maintenance.
• Your ecommerce or web platform work and your AI work are connected, and you would like one group to look at both.
• Your leadership group is small and you want a tightly facilitated conversation rather than a broad programme.

Choose Collective Campus if...

• Your priority is building your people's capability so teams use AI well and keep improving without outside help.
• You want AI adoption embedded over time through programmes like the 90 day sprint and AI champions, rather than a single event.
• You see team behaviours such as psychological safety, critical thinking and experimentation as part of the AI challenge.
• You want AI connected to other capabilities, such as design thinking, customer experience, agile or lean startup ways of working.
• You need AI governance to work at the level of daily team practice, not just as a policy document.
• You want energetic, practical facilitation, with flagship workshops led by Steve, that participants will remember and use.
• You work in a regulated sector such as government, financial services or legal and want sector-specific content.

Using both

These offers are not mutually exclusive. A reasonable pattern is to use a solutions partner to build a specific tool and a capability partner to prepare the team to use it well. If you go that way, agree early who owns the training content, who owns governance and how the two providers will share information about the tool and its limits.

Alternatives to MavensAI in Australia

MavensAI is one of several kinds of provider, and a fair shortlist usually draws from more than one category. Rather than naming and characterising specific competitors, here are the types you are likely to meet.

• Capability building and training companies. These focus on upskilling people and changing team behaviour. Collective Campus sits here, with AI training and adoption alongside wider capability areas. For a starting point, see the guide on how to choose an AI training provider in Australia and the overview of the best AI training for teams in Australia.
• AI implementation and solutions firms. These build custom tools, agents and integrations. MavensAI is an example of this category based on its own site description.
• Large management and technology consultancies. These typically offer enterprise-scale strategy and transformation, often with larger teams and longer engagements. Check how much of the delivery team you will actually meet.
• Platform vendors' own training and partner programmes. These are useful if you have already standardised on a particular AI platform, though they tend to be tool-specific.
• University and short-course providers. These suit individuals or small cohorts wanting formal credentials rather than organisation-wide capability change.
• Independent specialists. These include governance advisers, data and security specialists and sector-specific consultants who can fill gaps.

Shortlist three, not one. Whatever your starting point, speak to at least three providers before deciding, ideally from at least two categories. Comparing a solutions firm, a capability builder and a larger consultancy against the same brief tends to make your own needs clearer. Use the checklist and question table below to keep the comparison consistent.

Decision checklist

Work through this before you commit to any provider, including either of the two compared here.

• We have written down the specific problem we are solving, in one or two sentences.
• We know whether our main constraint is a missing tool, missing skills, missing leadership alignment or missing team conditions.
• We have agreed who in the organisation owns AI adoption and has authority to decide.
• We have identified which teams or roles will be involved first.
• We have checked whether we need something built, something taught, or both.
• We know our regulatory and data-handling constraints, and what we can and cannot put into AI tools.
• We have asked who will actually deliver the sessions and reviewed their background.
• We have asked how the programme is tailored to our context rather than delivered from a template.
• We have asked what happens after the main sessions and who is responsible for it.
• We have agreed two or three indicators of success and a baseline before starting.
• We have asked how the provider handles participants with very different skill levels.
• We have asked how governance and responsible use are covered in practice.
• We have checked the provider's experience with organisations like ours in size and sector.
• We have asked for the provider's published material and read it.
• We have confirmed delivery options for our locations, including online if relevant.
• We have asked how the provider keeps content current as tools and rules change.
• We have spoken to at least three providers and compared them against the same brief.
• We have agreed how leaders will visibly take part, not just sponsor.
• We have a plan for what internal champions or owners will carry the work forward.
• We have clarified what we own at the end, such as materials, playbooks or tools.

Questions to ask any provider on a scoping call

How a scoping call with Collective Campus works

Collective Campus programmes are not sold from a price list, because the right shape depends on the organisation. The scoping call is where that shape gets worked out. No prices, durations or group sizes are fixed in advance, and everything is tailored after the call.

What the call covers

The conversation usually starts with context: what the organisation does, where AI is already being used, what is working and what is not, and what has prompted the interest. It then moves to the outcome you want. That might be broader AI confidence across teams, a leadership team that is aligned and willing to experiment, clear governance people can follow, or a specific problem addressed through an AI design sprint.

It also covers constraints that shape design: your sector and regulatory environment, existing tools, how distributed your teams are, and how much time people can realistically give. Sector pages such as those for government, financial services and legal reflect common situations, but your own details are what matter on the call.

What you get afterwards

After the call, Collective Campus proposes a tailored programme built from the relevant elements, whether that is a leadership immersion, a 90 day adoption sprint, AI champions, governance work, or a combination with wider capability areas. You also get an honest view of fit. If another type of provider suits your need better, such as a firm that builds a custom tool, the call is the place to say so.

How to prepare

You do not need a polished brief. It helps to bring a short description of the problem, a sense of who the first teams would be, any policy or security constraints, and the names of other providers you are considering. If useful, read the guide to choosing an AI training provider beforehand and bring your own questions.

FAQ

What is the main difference between MavensAI and Collective Campus?

Based on its public site, MavensAI is an AI implementation and solutions service offering executive strategy workshops, custom AI agents and enablement. Collective Campus is a capability building company focused on helping teams build skills, behaviours and culture for AI, alongside areas like design thinking and psychological safety. One leans toward building solutions, the other toward building team capability.

Is MavensAI an AI training company?

Their site describes MavensAI as an AI implementation and solutions service. Training and enablement is one of four service areas, alongside consulting, custom AI solutions and ongoing support. The executive strategy workshop is a prominent offer. Buyers wanting a broader training programme should ask what the enablement offer includes beyond the workshop and solution-specific onboarding.

Does Collective Campus build custom AI tools?

No, building custom software or agents is not a core Collective Campus offer. The focus is capability building: AI training, adoption programmes, governance and team behaviours. If you need a bespoke tool built and supported, a solutions firm is likely a better fit, and a scoping call can help you decide whether capability work should run alongside it.

Which is better for executive AI strategy?

Both engage executives. MavensAI's site describes interactive executive strategy workshops producing roadmaps and prioritised use cases. Collective Campus offers a leadership team AI immersion that focuses on leaders building hands-on understanding and modelling the behaviours teams will follow. The better choice depends on whether you most need a strategy deliverable or leadership capability.

Can an organisation use both MavensAI and Collective Campus together?

Yes, and for some organisations that is sensible. A solutions partner can build a tool while a capability partner prepares teams to use it well and responsibly. Agree early who owns training content, governance and communication about the tool's limits, and make sure the two providers share enough information to avoid conflicting guidance.

How do the two compare on AI governance?

MavensAI's site lists ethics, governance, risk and security as a workshop topic and publishes blog content on governance. Collective Campus runs a dedicated AI governance programme and builds governance into adoption work, with emphasis on making rules workable for daily practice. Ask each provider how governance becomes behaviour, not just policy.

Where is each provider based?

MavensAI's site says it is Sydney-based. Collective Campus was founded in Melbourne and delivers across Australian cities, including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, with online options through online AI training. MavensAI's other delivery locations and online options are not stated on their public site, so ask directly.

How much do the programmes cost?

Neither provider's pricing is covered here. Collective Campus programmes are tailored after a scoping call, so costs depend on the design. MavensAI's public site did not state fees in the pages reviewed. For any provider, ask for a scoped proposal that sets out what is included, who delivers it and what you own at the end.

Who leads Collective Campus workshops?

Steve Glaveski, co-founder, still leads flagship workshops. The sessions are known for energy and entertainment, reflecting founder Steve Glaveski's background in stand-up comedy and bands, combined with practical tools participants can use the next morning. On the scoping call you can ask who will lead your specific programme and how the team is structured.

What does MavensAI's public site say about its workshop format?

Their site describes half-day, full-day and multi-day AI strategy workshops for typically 2 to 12 participants, with optional pre-work, a pre-workshop briefing and a follow-up discussion. Topics include AI readiness, strategic impact, use case development, roadmapping and governance. Check their site directly for current details of each format.

How should a buyer shortlist an AI provider in Australia?

Define the problem first, then speak to at least three providers from different categories, such as a capability builder, a solutions firm and a larger consultancy. Use the same brief and the same questions with each. The guide on how to choose an AI training provider in Australia walks through this in more detail.

Is Collective Campus only about AI?

No. AI is a major focus, but Collective Campus is a capability building company for teams. Programmes also cover design thinking, customer experience, lean startup and product sprints, agile, productivity, psychological safety, critical thinking and high-performance teams. The aim is to build high-performance culture and teams for the AI world, not to deliver AI content in isolation.

Next step

If you are weighing up MavensAI, Collective Campus or another option, the most useful next step is usually a short conversation about what you are actually trying to change. Book a scoping call with Collective Campus to talk through your context, your constraints and whether capability building is the right fit. If another type of provider suits you better, the call is a good place to find that out.

For more background before you speak to anyone, see the guide to designing an AI workshop for your leadership team, the piece on what makes a high-performing team in the AI world, and the overview of intrapreneurship programmes in large Australian organisations.

Sources

• MavensAI homepage: https://mavensai.com.au
• MavensAI AI Strategy Workshops for Executives (page on mavensai.com.au, as supplied in the research text)