In The Blink of AI with Georgie Healy – Details, episodes & analysis

This is a #paidpartnership with Commonwealth Bank

Blair is the Chief Engineer of Generative AI at Commonwealth Bank, overseeing nine to ten teams building the AI platform that powers Australia’s largest bank and its millions of customers. Including me, a Dollar Mite since primary school.

His origin story is not what you would expect. He was a self-described hacker who grew up clicking through every system configuration setting he could find on his mum’s school computers after hours. That curiosity took him from building on GPT-2 before ChatGPT even existed, to the heart of one of Australia’s most important institutions.

In this episode we get into:

• The litmus test he uses to spot bad AI use immediately
• Why context matters more than prompting
• What an AI platform actually is and why your company probably needs one
• Why software engineers need to take more accountability for what they build
• The single security mistake most people are still making
• Why it is absolutely not too late to figure AI out for yourself

Practical, candid, and full of things you can action today.

00:00 Intro

03:05 What Does a Chief Engineer of AI at a Bank Actually Do

06:02 How CBA Collaborates Across Hundreds of Engineering Teams

08:56 How to Keep Up With AI Tools Without Getting Overwhelmed

12:04 Why Tool Consistency Matters in Enterprise AI

14:56 Why Blair Shares His AI Insights Publicly

17:51 What Being a Hacker Really Means in Tech

20:50 How Blair Hudson Went From Startup AI to Commonwealth Bank

23:59 Why CBA Starts Every Sprint With a Real Customer Call

27:06 Why Over-Engineering Is Killing Your AI Projects

29:47 Where AI Is Actually Moving the Needle in Banking Right Now

32:15 Why the Year of the Agent Was Overhyped

34:41 How to Build AI Fast Without Cutting Corners on Safety

39:28 What Is an AI Platform and Why Does Your Company Need One

41:49 How CBA Handles Shadow AI and Tool Adoption at Scale

45:09 Why Context Is More Important Than Prompting

50:29 The Number One Security Mistake You Are Still Making

52:30 The Easiest Way to Start Using AI to Save Time Today

54:05 Why You Should Never Ship AI Output Without Reviewing It

55:38 Why It Is Not Too Late to Learn AI

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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"Can does not imply should."

That one line from Dr Simon Longstaff cuts to the heart of everything wrong with how the tech industry is currently building AI. The Executive Director of The Ethics Centre and one of Australia's most respected moral philosophers joins Georgie for a conversation that is equal parts grounding and mind-expanding, and one of the most important episodes the show has produced.

Simon's path to becoming Australia's foremost ethics expert is not what you would expect. He left school at 16, cleaned toilets on a remote island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, drove ambulances, became a paramedic and fire officer, and was eventually adopted by one of the clans of the Anindilyakwa people. It was at the end of a ship loading wharf that an indigenous elder taught him something about seeing patterns in the world, a lesson he has carried through 35 years of philosophical work and only recently realised had shaped everything.

In this episode he unpacks why ethics is not an optional extra bolted onto technology but the foundation it has to be built on, why the pharmaceutical approval model could be the blueprint for governing AI, and why "necessary fictions" mean that CEOs deploying AI are responsible for outcomes they literally cannot understand. He also makes the case that the coming wave of job displacement does not have to be a catastrophe, and explains what ancient Athens and pre-colonial Indigenous life have to do with universal basic income.

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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Stripe’s Head of Startups, Hayley Hopwood, joins Georgie to unpack what the next era of commerce actually looks like and why founders need to rethink payments now, not later.

They start with something unexpected: vibe coding a household chore app in 20 minutes. But the conversation quickly moves into much bigger territory. From OpenAI’s arrival in Australia to agentic commerce and Stablecoins, Hayley explains how AI is reshaping the final mile of every transaction and why payments are no longer just infrastructure, they are strategy.

They dive into frictionless checkout, tokenisation, and the psychology of “one click” buying. Hayley shares why Australia will not build the next foundational LLM but can absolutely dominate in niche AI verticals like health, insurance, agriculture and education. She also unpacks why founders must build for global from day one, even if they are only selling locally, and how ignoring tax, currency and billing models early can quietly kill your scale later.

Plus: is B2B SaaS actually dead, what jobs will change first in the AI era, why mediocrity will not survive, and what founders should do in 2026 to stay ahead of the curve.

This is a masterclass in building durable infrastructure in a world moving at AI speed.

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

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For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe. Apply for Stripe Startups at dayone.fm/stripe

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Every time you ask an AI to write a song, generate a script, or mimic a creative style, there's a good chance it learned how to do that by consuming someone's life's work, without asking, without paying, and without them ever knowing.

In October 2025, the Albanese Government became the first in the world to rule out a text and data mining exception to copyright law, a landmark win for creators that is now being actively challenged by the tech industry. It's the backdrop to everything Holly and Georgie discuss here.

Holly Rankin, the artist behind Jack River and founder of cultural strategy company Sentiment Agency, has testified before Australian Parliament and become one of the most articulate voices in the fight to ensure the AI economy doesn't get built on the back of stolen human culture. In this episode she and Georgie get into the staggering labour that goes into making a single song, why the "it's too complicated to license" argument from Big Tech is a convenient myth, and what the Anthropic book piracy settlement really signals about where this is all heading. But underneath the policy detail is a bigger question: if we let machines consume and replicate everything that makes us human, what exactly are we left with?

Jack River - https://www.jackrivermusic.com/

Holly Rankin Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-rankin-3535912b3/

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe. Apply for Stripe Startups at dayone.fm/stripe

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Tracey Spicer is one of Australia’s most respected journalists and the author of Man-Made: How the Bias of the Past Is Being Built into the Future. In this episode, Georgie sits down with Tracey for a sharp, funny, and occasionally jaw-dropping conversation about what happens when we treat AI like neutral math instead of what it really is: opinion written in code.

They unpack why algorithmic bias is getting worse in the generative AI era, how recommendation engines can quietly radicalise people (from Andrew Tate pipelines to hyper-performative “tradwife” culture), and why “move fast” without guardrails is a dangerous blueprint. The discussion also goes into the weird and unsettling frontier of humanoid home robots, privacy risks in always-on devices, and what Tracey learned researching sex robots, including the disturbing ways consent is engineered out of the product.

Plus: why Tracey’s favourite AI tool is Claude, what she thinks about Grok and the chaos machine of X, why we are not getting a four day work week anytime soon, and her case for “regulatory sandpits” to test AI safely before it hits the rest of the world.

01:10 – Tracey’s TEDx “The lady stripped bare” moment and why it still matters

04:45 – Beauty standards, AI filters, and why expectations on young women have intensified

08:20 – Man-Made and the epiphany that sparked Tracey’s AI obsession

11:10 – The AI arms race, speed, and why we are in the “seatbelt era” of tech

14:30 – Digital natives vs critical thinking: the hallucination blind spot

16:45 – Tracey’s AI stack: why Claude is her daily driver

19:05 – Humanoid home robots: convenience vs surveillance

21:55 – Strength vs security: what actually scares Tracey about robots

24:35 – Sex robots and the consent problem manufacturers do not talk about

28:10 – Algorithms as “opinions in code” and how radicalisation happens

33:10 – Removing bias: conversations, perspective checks, and inclusive design

35:00 – Grok, MechaHitler, and what happens when platforms mirror their owners

36:45 – Deepfake porn, consent, and why regulation is finally catching up

38:10 – No, AI will not magically deliver a four day work week

41:10 – Future jobs: law, AI assistants, and why juniors still need fundamentals

44:15 – Indigenous knowledge, language revitalisation, and the full-circle AI story

46:50 – Rapid fire: brain chips, Waymo, smart glasses, and AI “snog marry avoid”

49:55 – What we should do now: regulatory sandpits and real guardrails

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe. Apply for Stripe Startups at dayone.fm/stripe

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Enterprise AI is past the hype phase and into the hard part: scaling what works without breaking security, blowing out costs, or shipping chaos into production. In this episode, Georgie chats with AWS technologist Rada Stanic about using AI as a “study buddy” to renew technical certifications faster, and why tools like AWS QuickSight can generate strong first drafts of strategy docs when you provide the right templates and context.

They go deep on AIOps: the operational discipline enterprises need to deploy agents and GenAI reliably at scale. Rada breaks AIOps into five practical pillars: defining agent intent, identity and security boundaries, policy and governance, observability and evaluation, and managing the rapid model lifecycle as new LLMs drop constantly. The conversation also covers why security questions dominate every enterprise AI project, why data quality still makes or breaks outcomes, and why “RAG” is fading as a buzzword even though retrieval is still foundational.

Finally, Rada shares a sharp concern for the next generation: what happens to junior roles when AI fills the entry level work, and why the pace of change itself may become the next generation’s greatest advantage.

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe. Apply for Stripe Startups at dayone.fm/stripe

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Liam Millward is one of Australia’s most watched young founders, but this conversation goes way beyond the headline of raising a record pre-seed at 17. Liam breaks down how Instant is building an AI powered marketing manager for e-commerce brands, why retention marketing is the real lever for growth, and how personalisation at scale changes the economics of marketing teams.

Georgie and Liam unpack what it actually takes to win in B2B SaaS right now, why “nice-to-have dashboards” are getting crushed, and what young founders should do instead of spending their time posing with VCs. Liam also shares the downside of raising big too early, his bet on Google winning the model race, and the one tool he has mandated across Instant’s engineering team.

Plus: why New York (not SF) is the next chapter for Instant, how Australian buying habits can create painful customers, and Liam’s spicy prediction that AI agents will become the majority of internet traffic shockingly soon.

01:35 – Meet Liam Millward and the record-breaking pre-seed story

03:40 – Using AI to hire better and have deeper interviews

07:55 – What Instant actually does and why retention beats acquisition

12:00 – How AI personalization changes loyalty, margins, and growth

16:30 – Is B2B SaaS dead or just getting ruthless?

20:45 – Raising big too early, age bias, and proving people wrong

28:30 – Teenage founders, VC hype, and why starting small still wins

34:15 – New York expansion, Google vs OpenAI, and Claude Code

43:50 – AI agents, Australia’s talent drain, and what comes next

44:38 – Saying no to customers: Australia’s “buy from friends” trap

45:32 – Structure at Instant: obsession, speed, and a tiny leadership team

46:42 – Australia’s talent drain and what could change it

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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Win $2,000 in credits with the Day One Network — take our 2-minute audience survey before 30 June: dayone.fm/survey

Is the next AI breakthrough hiding in robotics, not chatbots?

This week on In the Blink of AI, Georgie Healy is joined by cognitive robotics researcher Colm Flanagan for a grounded look at the next phase of artificial intelligence beyond large language models. While tools like ChatGPT live comfortably in the cloud, robots do not have that luxury. A self-driving car, drone, or warehouse bot cannot wait seconds for an answer. Decisions have to happen instantly, on device. Colm explains why this constraint could force a fundamental rethink of how we build AI, pushing models to become smaller, faster, and rooted in real-world experience rather than just trained on internet text.

The conversation explores whether LLM progress is starting to plateau, what a “data ceiling” really means, and why chasing AGI might be the wrong goal altogether. From robots that form memories like humans to the privacy tradeoffs of machines that watch and learn from us, they unpack the technical limits, the hype cycles, and what actually matters for builders today. If you want a clear-eyed take on where AI is genuinely heading, and why the next breakthroughs may be physical rather than digital, this episode connects the dots.

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe. Apply for Stripe Startups at dayone.fm/stripe

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Josh Vinson works at the edge where AI meets the human brain. With a background in psychology and machine learning, he is part of a growing group of engineers exploring neural decoding, the emerging field focused on translating brain signals into meaningful insights about thought, intent, and experience. While the idea of “reading thoughts” still sounds like science fiction, Josh explains why parts of it are already real, and why recent advances in large language models have quietly accelerated progress in this space.

In this episode of In The Blink of AI, Georgie Healy sits down with Josh to unpack how brain computer interfaces actually work, what separates invasive implants like Neuralink from noninvasive approaches such as EEG, and why the hardest challenges are not ethical or philosophical but technical. They explore the twin problems of noisy hardware and radically different brains, and what it would take for neural decoding to become reliable enough for clinical and everyday use.

The conversation stretches beyond medicine into the future of communication itself. From experience transfer and lucid dreaming headsets to brain wearables that could track attention, presence, and mental fatigue, Josh shares a clear-eyed view of what might be possible and what should give us pause. If you’re curious about where human cognition and artificial intelligence truly begin to blur, this episode offers a grounded look at what’s coming and why it matters.

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

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Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe. Apply for Stripe Startups at dayone.fm/stripe

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Tom Newby, Head of AI and co-founder at Procure Pro, joins Georgie Healy for a fast, candid tour through the most useful, controversial, and surprisingly human parts of the AI wave.

They start with Tom’s favourite under-the-radar tool in Australia, Hex, and its new “AI data analyst” agent that can actually do analyst work, not just answer simple queries. Georgie shares her own weekend hack: using AI to redesign a very average rental outdoor area with photo-based before-and-afters.

From there, the conversation turns to the bigger questions: whether using LLMs makes us “lazy”, why the blank page problem is real (and how AI helps you get to a wrong answer fast so you can refine), and what it takes to build AI features that actually matter inside a product. Tom breaks down Procure Pro’s mission to save a billion hours of construction admin and explains “bid leveling”, the messy PDF-to-spreadsheet reality that procurement teams face every day.

Georgie also brings the headlines. They unpack Australia’s surge in commercial data centre construction (and why the export narrative might not hold), plus Tom’s spicy take on OpenAI’s recent cadence, model naming chaos, and why distribution and “apps” could matter more than raw model gains.

They finish with rapid-fire stories: Tom’s accidental three-hour job, a 7-Eleven game exploit turned Slurpee rewards, a surprisingly thoughtful answer on ADHD and LLM workflows, plus a practical trust framework for everyday AI users.

Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders.

It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

Visit https://www.deel.com/dayone

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

Stripe Startups

For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe. Apply for Stripe Startups at dayone.fm/stripe

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