🔥 Welcome to Agent Talk — a brand new series from Factory Fireside where our young engineers in the trenches building enterprise-scale agentic solutions break down what's really happening in AI.

In this debut episode, Kahn Nguyen, Neil Mazunder, and Harry Nguyen dive deep into the AI developments that actually mattered in 2025 — and what turned out to be just noise.

What we cover: → Is Opus 4.5 + Claude Code basically AGI? (Hot take alert 🌶️) → How reinforcement learning became THE word of 2025 → DeepSeek's papers that shook Silicon Valley → The shift from scaling laws to post-training optimisation → Why Chinese labs are outpacing American research → "Code is solved, but software isn't" — what this means for builders → Our predictions for 2026 and the next age of AI research

About Agent Talk: InsightFactory has been heavily invested in developing enterprise-grade agentic solutions. Agent Talk is hosted by three of our engineers who are right in the depths of building these solutions for clients — not just agentic solutions, but enterprise-scale agentic solutions.

🎙️ Hosts:

• Kahn Nguyen — Research Scientist @ insightfactoryAI
• Neil Mazunder — Forward Deployed Engineer @ insightfactoryAI Applied AI Team
• Harry Nguyen — Forward Deployed Engineer @ insightfactoryAI Applied AI Team

📍 About insightfactory.AI: We're an Australian AI company building enterprise-grade agentic solutions through our Forward Deployed Engineer model.

In this episode of Factory Fireside, I sit down with Dr. Sanjay Mazumdar — a pioneer who was building neural networks in the early 1990s before the internet even existed, and who has since shaped Australia's approach to AI, data, and national security.

Sanjay's journey spans developing the world's first mobile wallet at Motorola (in 1999!), leading the Data to Decisions CRC that spawned companies like Fivecast, serving as Chief Data Officer at KPMG, and now running the Defence Trailblazer — a $240 million initiative connecting universities, startups, and defence.

We go deep on:

→ Why most organisations get AI adoption completely backwards — and what to do instead

→ The real role of a Chief Data Officer (hint: it's not data governance)

→ Information warfare, deepfakes, and why guardrails alone won't protect us

→ Australia's quantum computing edge — and the encryption risks that come with it

→ What it actually takes to build a successful AI company (spoiler: it takes years)

→ Practical advice for business leaders preparing for the AI wave

Whether you're a founder, executive, or just trying to make sense of where AI is heading, this conversation delivers hard-won insights from someone who's been at the frontier for over three decades.

🎯 Key takeaways:

[00:00] — Introduction

[02:15] — Doing a PhD in neural nets before the internet existed

[08:30] — The world's first mobile wallet (1999)

[15:45] — Why "AI envy" is derailing business strategy

[24:10] — Where the CDO role should actually sit

[32:00] — Information warfare and the limits of ethical AI

[41:20] — Inside Australia's Defence Trailblazer

[48:30] — Quantum computing: opportunity and threat

[55:00] — How Fivecast went from research project to global success

[62:15] — Three things every business leader should do now

In this episode of Factory Fireside, Peter Inge sits down with Dr. Don Perugini, a pioneer in AI and agentic systems with over 20 years of real-world experience spanning defence, enterprise, healthcare, and startups. Together, they cut through the hype to explore what agents actually are, why most enterprise pilots stall, and what it really takes to move from experimentation to production impact.

This is not a surface-level LLM conversation. Don draws on decades of work building cognitive agents, federated AI systems, and large-scale simulations from predicting bushfire behaviour and modelling entire populations, to improving IVF success rates and enabling privacy-preserving AI in healthcare.

You’ll hear:

• Why agents didn’t start with LLMs, and why that history matters
• The real reasons 95% of AI pilots never reach P&L impact
• Why “narrow problems” outperform grand AI ambitions
• How agentic commerce and the agentic web will change SaaS and B2B
• Why AGI is mostly a distraction and what progress actually looks like
• What founders and technologists should focus on now to build durable AI businesses

This episode is essential viewing for technology leaders, founders, product teams, and anyone trying to understand where AI agents are genuinely delivering value and where the hype still vastly outweighs reality.

🎧 If you care about building AI that works in the real world, this one’s for you.

South Australia’s first Chief Data Officer, Peter Worthington, joins us for an honest conversation about the state of Data & AI and why many organisations are getting it wrong. In this episode, we unpack:

• Why AI pilots fail (and the real reason isn’t technology)
• How to know if your organisation is actually ready for AI
• The danger of chasing shiny tools and “AI FOMO”
• Why we hold AI to a higher standard than humans
• The truth about whether AI will “steal all the jobs”
• Why you should hire for personality and train the skills
• What leaders should really focus on in 2025 and beyond

Peter draws on decades of experience leading data transformations, advising government, and helping organisations avoid the hype and deliver outcomes that matter. 🔥

If you work in data, digital, technology, or leadership this is essential listening.

In this episode of Factory Fireside, Peter Inge, Co-founder & CEO of insightfactory.ai, sits down with Nicola Dorling, Group CIO at Downer Group and ranked #2 CIO in CIO Magazine 2024.

Together, they explore how enterprise technology leadership is being redefined in the era of Data & AI from scaling programs that actually deliver value, to killing Proof-of-Concepts early, to building teams and partnerships that execute relentlessly.

Nicola shares practical lessons on:

• Balancing value creation and risk in AI strategy
• Moving beyond endless POCs to production-ready outcomes
• Aligning AI initiatives to board-level financial metrics
• Building resilience and curiosity into technology teams
• What “the death of consulting” and “the future of the CIO” might really mean

It’s a conversation packed with candour, insight, and leadership perspective from someone who’s led digital transformation at the highest levels.

In this fireside, we explain how data and AI programs can work most effectively with enterprise architects in large organisations, cutting through the tension that often exists between the two. We highlight that while data and AI teams are driven by speed and experimentation, enterprise architects are too often perceived as rigid gatekeepers. Done poorly, EA slows everything down with excessive control, but done well it acts like town planning—using principles-based governance to set guardrails while enabling innovation at pace. We discuss how the true value of EA lies in aligning technology, business, and people design with strategy, equipping executives with better insight maps for data-driven decision-making, and establishing “freedom within boundaries” so AI teams can innovate safely. We also challenge the role of outdated architecture review boards, showing how embedding architects directly into agile delivery teams ensures principles are applied in real time. The core message is that effective EA doesn’t police data and AI—it empowers it, balancing safety with speed to drive transformation at scale