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