AI Australia Podcast

In today's episode we speak to Samantha Garrett (AI & Automation Platform Lead at Canva) who reveals Canva's internal roadmap for deploying AI across business units, balancing user freedom with enterprise risk.

Canva's AI journey moved from "AI everywhere" to "AI impact" and then "AI native". Now Samantha Garrett believes the next phase is AI accountability. The experimentation honeymoon is ending, the bills are arriving, and organisations need to know whether their AI spend is creating genuine value.

Samantha explains why usage metrics are not the same as ROI, how to encourage experimentation without wasting money, and why AI financial literacy may become one of the most important leadership challenges of the next few years.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Multi-Model Strategy: Why Canva gives employees total choice between Claude, Glean, ChatGPT, and Gemini.

• Automation vs. Pure AI: Why the biggest operational wins come from combining automation platforms with AI.

• Measuring What Matters: Why traditional ROI frameworks fail for personal productivity, and how to measure real team transformation.

• Navigating AI Fatigue: How leaders can support their teams through constant tech disruption and burnout.

Essential insights for CTOs, CDOs, and business leaders seeking a real-world playbook for enterprise AI adoption.

Most organisations treat AI governance as the thing that slows innovation down. Luli Adeyemo believes the opposite is true.

A technology executive, entrepreneur and former BMX world champion, Luli has spent decades breaking into rooms where she was not expected to belong. Now she is challenging leaders to rethink what responsible AI looks like—and who gets to define it. She explains why appointing a single "AI person" is not governance, why a policy document cannot replace shared accountability, and why the best governing body looks more like a complete executive team than a compliance tick box.

This is a practical and provocative conversation about moving fast without moving blindly: building AI literacy, bringing the right perspectives into decisions and creating the confidence to innovate safely.

If you'd like to find out more about the AI Governance Practitioners Programme, run by Tech Diversity, which Luli talks about during the show you can find out more here.

As part of our Aussie Start-Up Series we talk to Jo Thomas, founder of Enrola an AI sales agent platform helping B2C sales teams convert more leads into customers.

Jo and her co-founder have built an AI sales agent that her own customers now refer to by name, and love. In this episode, she breaks down the maths behind why a $80,000-a-year employee might only be delivering $15,000 of real value, why AI works best as an amplifier for humans rather than a replacement, and where she draws a hard line: no AI should be helping someone choose their health insurance or their degree. A clear-eyed look at where automation earns its place, and where it doesn't.

Everyone's convinced AI is coming for engineering jobs. Tom Goerke, National President of Engineers Australia, thinks that fear is almost exactly backwards, and he's got 19th-century coal miners to prove it.

In this episode, Tom unpacks Jevons' paradox: the counterintuitive economic pattern where making something more efficient doesn't reduce demand for it, it explodes it. He walks through what that means for software engineers right now (spoiler: more code is being written than ever, and more bugs with it), why "coders are the typists of the '70s," and why the real crisis isn't job losses, it's a widening skills gap between engineers who've mastered AI and everyone else. We also cover the one stat that stopped us in our tracks: 66% of engineers have had zero formal AI training from their employer.

Lee Hickin has spent 30 years at the frontier of technology, from IBM and AWS to serving as CTO of Microsoft Australia. Now, as Executive Director of the National AI Centre, he's asking a confronting question of every boardroom in Australia: when the risk and the opportunity depends on AI, who in the room is actually the expert? In this episode, Lee breaks down why AI governance is failing in most organisations, what boards and executives must do differently right now, and why he believes Australia's greatest risk isn't moving too fast, it's not moving with enough confidence. Lee's view is that many Australian boards are fundamentally unprepared for the AI decisions landing on their desks, that technology literacy must become a first-class citizen in board composition, and that the greatest failure isn't having an AI incident, it's not knowing how to respond when you do.

We also discussed that we might be underestimating Australia's sovereign AI, with Australia's AI-start up community showing true innovation and not just building more AI product bolt-ons.

This is a conversation about courage, governance, and what it means to lead in an age defined by a technology that changes everything.

Before ChatGPT changed everything, Arvind Jain was already four years deep into solving a problem every knowledge worker knows but no one had fixed: why is it so impossible to find anything at work?

In this episode, the CEO of Glean, the enterprise AI platform used by some of the world's most iconic companies, takes us inside the founding story that started not in a garage, but in the wreckage of hypergrowth. When his previous company grew from 500 to 2,000 people in a single year, things started to break. Software releases stalled, teams lost each other, and the lowest-scoring question in their employee survey? Do I have the information I need to do my job? That moment of failure became a billion-dollar idea. Arvind opens up about his time in the early days of Google, co-founding Rubrik, and then walking away from success, again to build something that didn't exist yet. This one is for anyone who's ever wasted an afternoon searching for a file that should have taken 30 seconds to find.

Why are the world's most powerful executives "resting and vesting" in the corner instead of innovating?

Dom Price joins the podcast to discuss the psychological warfare happening inside modern boardrooms. He breaks down his "Minus 1, 0, plus 1" framework, a strategic ladder for moving from fixing broken processes to discovering "net new" value that didn't exist two years ago.

From the importance of human-in-the-loop coaching to the surprising power of storytelling in a digital age, Dom shares how to build a psychologically safe environment where experimentation is rewarded and AI becomes an amplifier for human genius, not a replacement for it.

Dom is a work futurist, formerly Atlassian's in-house team doctor, where he helped scale one of Australia's great tech success stories from 600 people to over 16,000. He's a director of Deloitte alumni, a TED speaker, a keynote provocateur who's taken his ideas across 53 countries and someone who genuinely believes that AI isn't our biggest challenge right now, people are.

Dom is now a leader at Be Luminous, who are helping organisations spark movements, accelerate impact and unlock the full potential of their people.

What if the knowledge locked inside the heads of the world's most elite scientists could be downloaded into a "nervous system" for everyone?

Craig Rayner spent decades watching life-saving drugs fail simply because the right person wasn't in the room. Now, he's built a Peer Review Agent that mimics a full development committee with 95% accuracy. We discuss the white-knuckle ride of leaving a high-flying corporate career to democratize medicine, the "Kodak moments" facing the industry, and why he believes it is now "unethical" not to use AI to save lives.

Oktopi's purpose is to democratise world-class drug development expertise: embedding it within human-guided, AI-enabled workflows and amplifying innovation through a connected global community.

Can AI truly understand the nuances of a busy commercial kitchen or a retail floor?

Ciaran and Deepesh from Deputy join the podcast to discuss the journey of launching Deputy AI, an agentic framework designed specifically for the mobile-first, fast-paced world of frontline work.

We delve into the Deputy's unique approach to early testing with customers, the challenges of driving AI literacy amongst non-desk workers, and why the next frontier of workforce management might be entirely voice-activated.

Plus, hear about their personal "life-hack" AI agents: from managing global friend groups to optimising solar energy at home.

In the world of FinTech, there are those who talk about AI, and those who ship it. Tracy Moore, GM of AI and Data at MYOB, is firmly in the latter camp. In this episode, Tracy reveals how one of Australia's leading tech innovators is leveraging the latest in generative tech to solve the most enduring challenges for small businesses: time and cash flow.

We explore the "AI Sandwich"—a framework for understanding that while the "filling" (the LLM) is exciting, the "bread" (data foundations and UX) is what actually determines success.

Tracy shares a masterclass in building a culture of "AI as a team sport," where cross-functional ambition meets practical execution. From managing parallel streams of "no-regrets" features to exploring the exciting white space of autonomous agents, this conversation is a roadmap for any leader looking to turn complex tech into beautiful, human-centric products.

Tracy shares her personal experience of "Vibe Coding" as a modern love language, and why the secret to high-performing AI teams might actually just be... more cake.

• The 20/80 Rule: Why successful AI products are 20% technology and 80% organisational mindset.

• Building Beautiful UX: Moving beyond the chatbox to create intuitive, invisible AI experiences.

• The Power of Ambition: How MYOB's executive team set the tone for ambitious AI goals.

• Practical Guardrails: The importance of "Steel Threads" and rolling out agents gradually to ensure mission-critical accuracy.