Deel's COO on the AI Agent Writing Its Own Code

Georgie Healy talks to Dilani Kahawala, who built Anna, an AI assistant for parents. Anna connects to your emails and calendars and surfaces what needs your attention through iMessage or WhatsApp, like a change to the swimming carnival instructions. They open on the admin that never stops. Georgie shares the day she completely forgot to pick up her son from school, and Dilani explains the mental load, why she carries her husband's admin in her head too, and the guilt of letting other volunteer parents run the school WhatsApp group. Dilani describes building Anna, from hundreds of hours of data labeling so an AI trained mostly for coding learns that soccer matters and a Pilates discount doesn't, to the nine experiments and the pivot from enterprise to consumer. She also covers privacy, saying Anna never sells data and doesn't train on it. The second half turns to kids and AI. Dilani has already introduced AI to her eight-year-old, but doesn't want him using it to get the answer, and argues that learning to think critically is the skill that matters most. She says waiting until kids are 15 isn't the answer, supervision is, and she's honest that she doesn't know how humans stay in control once they stop understanding what AI does. The episode closes with a round of What's Harder, from theoretical physics versus the school pickup to naming a startup versus naming a child.

Georgie Healy talks to Guy Fenton, who heads up go-to-market for Akai, the AI workflow automation platform from Deel. Akai started as an internal tool at Deel and is now offered to other companies as a way to automate repetitive back-office work across finance, HR and operations. Georgie opens with the headless debate: if software no longer needs a login screen, does design still matter? Guy's answer is that UX matters more than UI right now, because his customers would rather use agents inside Slack, Teams or a webhook than log in anywhere. He explains how Akai builds an agent from a screen recording, and describes the virtual country finance manager Deel built for month-end bank reconciliation, which he says does the work of 10 people while the team reviews and approves it in Slack. They get into what makes agent projects stick, why the non-technical user is the real bottleneck, and why forward deployed engineers sit with customers to get them to value fast. Guy says the people getting ahead are citizen developers, curious people in HR, ops and finance who adopt AI every day, and he predicts they become the leaders of the future. He also shares a hack for anyone building a team: ask AI to play your toughest buyer, then let it score your answers. The conversation closes on jobs, trust and privacy: why Guy frames AI as optimizing jobs rather than replacing them, how regions from APAC to Germany react to security questions, why he would only trust an agent with his tax return after a few human-approved runs, and his bet that open source models will give the frontier labs a run for their money.

Georgie Healy talks to Mirko Gropp, General Manager of Digital, Data and Technology at The Living Company, live from Dreamforce day three. The Living Company owns, develops and operates student housing, build-to-rent apartments and senior living across Australia, with around 2,000 people and about $17 billion in assets by Mirko's count. Mirko's take on the week: Salesforce going headless means the UI, long the moat for software companies, is no longer the point, and Claude arriving inside Salesforce lets his team ask plain-language questions of their cases. He says agentic coding lets him build in 3 months what used to take a year, with 2 people who never touch the code. They get into how a company rolls AI out when a small group of super users does most of the heavy lifting, and the HR question nobody has answered yet: how do you reward someone who is 10x more productive? Mirko explains why students hate email and voice, how The Living Company will build its first agent for senior living, and why most customer chat doesn't need a top-tier model. If you have a custom tool you assumed was too hard to build, this one is the push. Mirko's advice is to describe the outcome you want, let the tool walk you there, and be a critical, proactive builder. Captions 00:00 Cold open 01:30 Welcome back: the final Dreamforce interview 01:39 Headline: AI agents don't need screens 03:29 Headline: Headless 360 and the 5% AI value gap 05:27 Headline: How AI ends email and password fatigue 08:59 Mirko joins live from Dreamforce 10:22 The Living Company and the headless shift 11:49 Building in 3 months with 2 people who never touch code 12:51 Onboarding 10,000 students with 80% old school automation 13:53 What chatbot questions reveal, plus Cowork inside Salesforce 15:14 Rolling AI out to staff and the super users 16:56 The HR question: employees who are 10x more productive 17:20 Students trying to jailbreak the agent 18:13 Senior living: building the first agent 19:44 Designing for Gen Z and seniors 23:11 Tone of voice and rebuilding the bot with Salesforce 24:18 Shipping 5x to 10x faster than 10 years ago 25:47 Rapid fire: will AI disrupt property? 27:52 Predicting who's leaving and filling rooms early 28:40 You don't need Fable for everything 30:04 Where The Living Company goes next 32:16 Mirko's advice for builders 34:28 Outro: Attention is All I Need

Description Couldn't make it to Dreamforce? Salesforce is bringing the latest from the event to Sydney on 20 October and Melbourne on 27 October with Agentforce World Tour Essentials. Find out more: https://www.salesforce.com/au/events/ Recorded at Dreamforce 2026, Georgie sits down with Joe Inzerillo, President, Enterprise and AI Technology at Salesforce. Joe oversees Slack and leads Salesforce's Customer Zero program, where the company puts its own AI to work on itself before customers do. Before Salesforce he was CTO of Disney Streaming, where he led the launch of Disney+, and Chief Product and Technology Officer at SiriusXM. Joe breaks down Claudeforce, the Salesforce and Anthropic partnership, and why he thinks the SaaSpocalypse story never held up. He explains what headless means for a platform built around screens, and why he says the UI was necessary but not the point Then he gets into Customer Zero: small squads that pair a business owner with a couple of technologists to build with coding agents, sometimes shipping within the day. Joe shares the numbers Salesforce is seeing, including a legal team agent he says now routes tickets more accurately than the lawyers who used to do it by hand. Plus the story of when a Salesforce agent recommended a competitor! In the rapid fire, Georgie asks what Joe thinks is nonsense here on the ground, and what he predicts for Dreamforce 2027.

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar built Atlassian into one of Australia's most successful tech companies, and one of the rare local startups to become a global software giant. Journalists John Stensholt and Perry Williams join Georgie to discuss their new book on the two co-founders: how they scaled a hundred-billion-dollar company side by side, and what it takes to lead a business through a major leadership transition. They cover how co-CEO leadership worked inside Atlassian, how the culture evolved as the founders' roles changed, and what it took to keep the business moving through it. Then the big question: where does Atlassian stand now? They get into the share price, the pressure on software companies to prove themselves in the AI era, and how Atlassian is positioning for its next chapter. Plus, John and Perry reflect on what each founder brought to the company, and what other Australian founders can learn from them.