Jason Tan

Meet the Ignite+ Scale Excel Cohort! 🔥 Advance Queensland’s Ignite+ Scale program is helping some of Queensland’s most promising scaleups accelerate their growth with tailored support, expert coaching, and exclusive opportunities. 💡 Two specialised streams: ✅ Aspire – Early-stage scaleups refining their strategies with coaching support. ✅ Excel – The Top 10 most scaleup-ready businesses receiving deep-dive coaching, masterclasses, and exclusive growth opportunities, including the Brisbane 2032 Olympic & Paralympic Games Webinar! Meet the Excel Cohort 👇 🏥 Five Faces – Revolutionising consumer experiences in healthcare, education & government. ♻️ Handel Group Pty Ltd – Transforming waste management with SaaS innovation. 👛 Luxe.It.Fwd – Leading the way in luxury re-commerce. 🗺 Mangoesmapping – Geospatial tech specialists driving regional innovation. 🔩 National Plastics & Rubber Pty Ltd – Industrial manufacturing for global industries. 🧺 The Laundry Lady – Mobile laundry service across AU & NZ. 📊 Truii – Data-driven web applications for government & natural resource management. 🌱 Verterra Ecological Engineering – Regenerative development for a sustainable future. 💰 Wagepay – Giving employees access to earned wages before payday. 🔥 Wildfire Energy – Game-changing waste-to-energy technology. Projected impact from this cohort 👇 💰 $88M+ revenue 👥 172 full-time jobs currently operating in `16 regions globally 🌏 Expanding into the UK, USA, Europe & the Middle East 💡 Did you know? 4 of these scaleups are female-founded, with many leading the way in sustainability, waste management, and renewable energy. Queensland’s future is scaling up - and we’re here for it! 🚀 #IgniteScale #AdvanceQueensland #ScaleupSuccess

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Sydney-based Lorikeet has raised $35 million USD in a Series A funding round to deliver its AI-powered universal customer concierges. Lorikeet helps businesses create universal AI concierges that solve real problems, not just answer questions. Unlike traditional chatbots, Lorikeet's omnichannel concierges can make judgment calls and take action to resolve complex issues across chat, email, and voice, focusing on high-consequence actions in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare. The round was led by QED Investors, with participation from Blackbird, Square Peg, Airtree, and the founders of Airwallex and Canva, making Lorikeet the first company since Canva to receive backing from all three of Australia's top VCs. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and support global go-to-market efforts in the second half of 2025. Congratulations to co-founder & CEO Steve Hind and the Lorikeet team. PR Newswire: https://lnkd.in/dnBBH2pT #AI #CustomerExperience #CX #Automation #VentureCapital #Funding #SeriesA #FinTech #AussieTech

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Great talk from Ned Letcher tonight at the Melbourne MLAI Meetup. I loved this slide about "using the right tool for the job" because there are two valid ways to look at this. The first view is that you should go left to right: choose the simplest solution that works for you use case, rather than jumping straight into a LLM/GenAI solution. This is great advice. But a second view is that you should go right to left. Start by building a quick prototype using pre-trained LLMs, leveraging the power of foundation models to solve a wide range of problems. Then, you can optimise performance, cost, latency, etc. by moving away from LLMs to more efficient solutions.

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The question isn't whether AI will transform software engineering. The question is whether you'll lead this transformation or become its casualty. We're witnessing the death of incremental progress in software engineering—and the birth of computational dominance. The AI revolution in software development isn't evolution; it's systematic obliteration of legacy paradigms. While competitors debate optimization, visionary operators are architecting the future—and the Windsurf Acquisition Saga serves as our tactical blueprint for seizing this inflection point. This isn't just about faster coding; it's about redefining the very nature of the development cycle. My latest analysis dissects how industry titans executed a sophisticated resource allocation war—positioning this acquisition not as a transaction, but as a future-focused land grab that creates an unbridgeable chasm between neural-augmented organizations and traditional development shops. The Windsurf Acquisition Saga isn't just a business story; it's a systems-level blueprint for the future of AI-powered software engineering's architecture. I try to dissect the recent Windsurf acquisition, revealing it as a pivotal case study in distributed AI development. This "future-focused land grab" signifies a competitive chasm separating organizations that embrace neural-augmented development from those clinging to traditional workflows. Here is the link to it: https://lnkd.in/ehYPvWFy In my latest analysis, I unpack: - The Multi-Party Optimization: How OpenAI, Google, and Cognition executed a sophisticated resource allocation strategy, valuing IP, human cognitive capital, and operational infrastructure differently. - Agentic IDE Architecture: The profound technical sophistication of Windsurf's AI-enhanced coding environment, where autonomous agents execute complex tasks, fundamentally shifting developer productivity. - The Productivity Multiplication Effect: The exponential velocity unleashed by integrating AI into end-to-end software delivery pipelines, moving from syntactic tools to cognitive architectures. - Strategic Implications: The evolution of software engineers from imperative programmers to declarative AI orchestrators, navigating new cognitive complexities and a tiered automation model. Are you ready to lead the charge in this new computational era?

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The Government recently released 'New Zealand's Strategy for Artificial Intelligence: Investing with Confidence' — a significant milestone (albeit a late one). As Hon Dr Shane Reti notes in his foreword: "Until now, New Zealand was the only OECD country that had not published an AI strategy." Despite the delay, the private sector hasn’t been sitting still. Kiwi businesses have been leading the charge — experimenting, building, and deploying AI while policy has caught up. Yes, the strategy contains some promising signals. For example, the Minister encourages business to: "...invest with confidence in AI. The Government wants greater use of AI in business and stands ready to support your AI journey through guidance, and policies that enable rather than constrain innovation" That said, the reception has been mixed. Frankly, some have (charitably) referenced it as underwhelming — say more a starting point than a bold vision. So, it’s timely that the AI Forum NZ is hosting a lunchtime webinar to unpack the strategy and its practical implications: 🎟️ https://lnkd.in/gEnZrvXu #NZAI

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An important update for colleagues delivering #datagovernance here in NZ: the guidance for Māori data associated to the new Information Sharing Standard has now dropped. When the initial guidance came out the Māori data governance requirements embedded in the new standard led to a few second order questions. The initial supporting guidance developed the material in the standard, but that was only provisional. That guidance has since been chopped up into sections and expanded, E.g model legal clauses for updating contracts. I started analysing the implications of the four small rules in the standard in the beginning of June and only concluded about three weeks ago. Aka the implications are significant for the existing body of data governance regimes (broadly understood). Furthermore, the expectations are embedded in the standard so we can't pick and choose the bits we like/agree with and treat the remainder as optional Fortunately there are pathways to making all the various regimes synchronise but obtaining that solution necessitates changes in the order of operations (there is a BEDMAS for data governance). Usefully the standard elevates the Te Kāhui Raraunga framework up a level and that excellent body of work helps with the reframing and reordering.

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