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.