In The Blink of AI with Georgie Healy

This is a #paidpartnership with Commonwealth Bank
Episode Summary
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.
Time Stamps
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
In the Blink of AI is made possible by our wonderful partners
Deel
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

✨ Connect with Georgie Healy
Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/
The Day One Network
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:
Deel x PX_Post Intro

"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.
In the Blink of AI is made possible by our wonderful partners
Deel
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

✨ Connect with Georgie Healy
Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/
The Day One Network
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:
Deel x PX_Post Intro

Episode Summary
When Katelyn Lesse was leading engineering at Stripe, she noticed everything around her shifting because of AI. So she left, and joined Anthropic. Today she leads platform engineering at one of the most important AI companies in the world, which is why we were so thrilled to host her for Anthropic's first ever interview in Sydney.
Katelyn does not lead with technical jargon. She leads with a question every builder needs to sit with right now. Are you building on the exponential, or are you stuck on the linear? Most people, she says, are already further behind than they realise.
In this episode she shares the exact framework she uses to think about building in the AI era, why your frustrations with Claude are actually signals you are onto something, and what it really means to be AGI pilled inside Anthropic.
Time Stamps
00:00 Intro
02:53 AI Hack: Using Claude to Pick Wine
03:42 Katelyn's Background and Path to Anthropic
05:32 Why She Left Stripe to Join Anthropic
11:22 What Building on the Exponential Means
11:48 Why Australia Is a Top AI Market
13:05 Is the Claude Obsession Healthy?
15:20 The Framework for Building AI Products
16:38 Why Evals Are Non-Negotiable
18:18 Inside Anthropic's Developer Platform
20:11 What Is Harness Engineering?
25:13 AI Security, Sandboxes and Human in the Loop
29:09 Cloud Managed Agents Explained
31:56 Open Source MCP vs Closed Claude
33:48 How AI Is Changing Engineering Teams
36:24 How to Choose the Right AI Coding Tool
39:12 The End of the Traditional Tech Team
44:30 The AI Magic Moment Everyone Remembers
45:30 What It Means to Be AGI Pilled
47:21 Rapid Fire With Anthropic
49:56 Advice for Developers Building With AI
In the Blink of AI is made possible by our wonderful partners
Deel
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

✨ Connect with Georgie Healy
Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/
The Day One Network
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:
Deel x PX_Post Intro

Episode Summary
Anna Zhou and Vivian Shen, the co-founders of Toastie, join Georgie Healy for one of the warmest and most personal conversations the show has had. Two software engineers at Google by day, they have quietly built one of the most thoughtful health tracking apps in the world by night, all without spending a single dollar on marketing.
Toastie was born from a problem they were both living. Anna was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and handed a few photocopied sheets to figure out the rest of her life from. Viv has been managing PCOS for years, experimenting with medications and diets on her own. They realised the tools available simply were not built for people like them, so they built one themselves. Today Toastie helps users track symptoms, food, body signals, lab reports and scans, surfacing the patterns and irregularities that would otherwise go unnoticed.
In this episode they unpack why almost one in two Australians live with a chronic illness but no one talks about it, why slapping AI on everything is the wrong instinct and how they decide which features actually need it, and the cold LinkedIn email that landed them their first global partnership before they even had a product. They also share why ChatGPT and Gemini are not enough when the stakes are this high, what their users actually write to them in the feedback form, and the story of the user who quietly security audited their app and was so impressed they wrote in to tell them.
Plus the early hackathon they won by faking the backend in real time, why they call themselves boomers when it comes to social media, the worst startup advice they have ever received, and a special offer just for In The Blink of AI listeners.
🎁 Use promo code ITBOA2026 to get a 90 day free trial of Toastie
🍞 Find your Toastie personality: https://toastie.au/quiz
Time Stamps
00:00 Intro
02:20 AI Hacks and Life at Google Sydney
07:00 How They Met and Their Hackathon Wins
10:51 What is Toastie and Why It Matters
13:50 The Personal Stories Behind the Product
16:23 How They Use AI (And Where They Don't)
17:37 The Cold Email That Landed a Global Partnership
20:00 Why General AI Models Aren't Enough
23:25 Building, Prioritising and the Competition
25:13 Why They Refuse to Call Themselves an AI Company
27:57 Trust, Security and User Feedback
30:00 Going Viral With Zero Marketing Spend
33:33 Handling AI Hate Online
35:43 Rapid Fire and What's Next
38:45 Special Offer for Listeners
In the Blink of AI is made possible by our wonderful partners
Deel
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

✨ Connect with Georgie Healy
Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/
The Day One Network
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:
Deel x PX_Post Intro

"Code is getting cheaper. Which means taste is getting more expensive."
That one idea from Andrew Hogan reframes everything people think they know about competing in AI right now. Andrew, Head of Insights at Figma, joins Georgie to make the case that features are no longer a moat, and that the companies quietly investing in how their product feels are the ones building something that's actually hard to copy.
In this episode they get into why 56% of non-designers are already doing design work, why the job title "designer" isn't going anywhere, and why anyone who's still treating design as a finish-line coat of paint is going to get lapped. They also unpack what agent management platforms actually need to get right, why design matters even more when kids are the users, and what GeoCities taught us about creative ownership that most product teams have completely forgotten.
Plus: the prompting-together technique that turns prototyping into a team sport, why "no tech at all" is unnecessarily painful for parents, Andrew's verdict on Australian coffee, and why the golden era of the side project might be the most important shift nobody's naming loudly enough.
✨ Connect with Georgie Healy
Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/
The Day One Network
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:
Deel x PX_Post Intro