AI Australia Podcast

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.