Show Notes
In this episode of This Week in AI brought to you by the AI Australia podcast, Kobi and Natalie dive into wide-ranging discussions covering recent political events, traversing: The implications of the French and UK election outcomes, and their relation to technology. AI's role in the U.S. presidential elections Tech sector developments like Meta's Llama models, and the economic and environmental impact of AI advancements The intersection of AI with job markets, wealth distribution, and universal basic income studies, while also considering the cultural and ethical impacts of technological integration in corporate settings The recent global technology outage caused by CrowdStrike on Microsoft Windows Links: The Grimy Residue of the AI Bubble Toby Murray: What really happened at CrowdStrike... Business Insider: CrowdStrike CEO Has Twice Been at the Centre of Global Tech Failure Lawfare: The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
More from AI Australia Podcast
Most organisations treat AI governance as the thing that slows innovation down. Luli Adeyemo believes the opposite is true.
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?
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.