Dilani Kahawala has three kids, a partner with a busy job in tech, and a startup to run. At the dinner table, with twenty minutes to get the kids fed, all too often she’d be thinking about what goes in tomorrow’s lunchboxes and planning logistics for the week ahead, rather than simply being present with her kids. That’s the mental load that Anna, the AI assistant for parents, was designed to carry.

Dilani path to co-founding a startup was a winding one. She got a PhD in theoretical physics, before deciding physics and academia moved too slowly for her tastes. Following a stint at McKinsey, and working product roles at Etsy, Meta and Atlassian, she co-founded a company and developed Braid, an AI powered tool designed to help software teams with project management. After deciding Braid didn’t have product market fit, the team went through a period of rapid exploration, experimenting with eight or nine different product ideas in a five month period. After gaining strong early traction, Anna was the idea that stuck.

In this episode, Kate Glazebrook sits down with Dilani about the decision to move away from using frontier models in favour of open source AI models, how the Anna team internally leverage AI agents “up the wazoo”, the surprising fact that most of their users eschew the Anna app in favour of communicating with Anna directly in messaging apps, and why Dilani isn't too worried about OpenAI launching a parent product.

As a cardiac surgery trainee in Sydney, David Bell saw how much a stroke patient’s chances of recovery depended on their postcode. If they lived in Sydney and got treatment quickly, their chances of recovery could be 75-80%. But in much of the developing world where treatment options were often far more limited, it could be as low as 10%.

Today, David is cofounder and CEO of Remedy Robotics, a startup with the goal of making endovascular surgery – the catheter-based treatment for strokes like these – available to anyone who needs it, wherever they live. The need is enormous: stroke is the world's second leading cause of death and a leading cause of disability, and every hour of delay makes it less likely a patient will live independently again. Yet only about 3% of the world has access to the kind of care that lets patients not just survive a stroke, but get back to something like normal life.

Remedy Robotics have built a robot that is designed to be operated by a surgeon remotely. The aim is that a specialist in Sydney could one day treat a stroke patient in Suva. Remedy has already run the first fully robotic endovascular procedure in a human, as well as procedures on four patients fully remotely, in Toronto.

In this episode, Kate Glazebrook sits down with David to talk about his experience going from surgeon to startup founder, the nuanced details about how hospitals decide which technology to invest in, how remaining in stealth caused Remedy Robotics some challenges when it came to recruiting talent early on, and plenty more.

Once a technology gets good enough, the only real ceiling left is what you can imagine for it. Satya Tammareddy and Rowena Westphalen watch OpenAI's models improve week by week, and work closely with organisations implementing AI across multiple industries. In their view, the hard part isn't the limits of the tools. It's the pace. Even people working at the frontier can't quite get their bearings before the next model lands. No wonder everyone else feels like they're chasing something that keeps moving. The upside, they'd argue, makes the vertigo worth it. If you can dream it, you can probably build it now.

Satya leads OpenAI's go-to-market across Australia and New Zealand. Rowena leads Applied AI Architecture, whose forward deployed engineers build inside a customer's business rather than handing over a finished product.

From moving beyond traditional software implementations to embedding forward-deployed engineers directly inside teams, Rowena and Satya share front-line insights from working alongside some of Australia and New Zealand’s most ambitious organisations. Whether you are a founder scaling internal tools or an executive rethinking your company's core value chain, this conversation offers a practical roadmap for navigating the pace of modern AI development.