An App, A Method, A Model.

Three speakers this month, with three very different starting points. One built a working B2B app with AI and no coding background. One has spent 25 years helping regional businesses adapt to economic and technological change. One is a researcher at La Trobe Bendigo working across AI and healthcare.

Come for the pizza, stay for the conversations, and leave with some practical ideas.

Speakers

Michael Robinson - Landholder Connect: 1000 Issues, 500 PRs, 2 Months, 1 Person, Part-Time. Using AI to build a B2B app, with zero coding experience.

Someone with no coding background would be mad to try building a real business app by himself, right? Michael shares lessons from a year-long journey building an app with AI. He covers:

• How to build a workflow that protects your scarcest resources: your time, attention and judgement

• What you need to know about AI and code

• How to be fearless in the face of real software developers

About Michael

Michael is a geologist who grew up in Melbourne and worked in WA for about 10 years. He travelled, moved around, got lost, found himself again, had a kid, moved to Bendigo, and made various other questionable choices.

He has spent 15 years working in minerals exploration, hydrogeology and land access consulting. That includes hands-on landholder liaison work on minerals exploration, major transmission and rail infrastructure projects.

Landholder Connect exists because there were only two real options for managing landholder and stakeholder contact records. One was a spreadsheet. The other was a system built for major companies with their own community-relations departments. Nothing sat in between, until now.

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Peter Morris - TechGrafting

Large corporations standardise their operations to grow. That makes them less flexible at the local level, where the customers are, and leaves gaps in the market. Peter's TechGrafting concept rests on three ideas:

• Corporate scale opens niches. Standardisation removes local flexibility and leaves real opportunities behind.

• Small business owners hold hidden knowledge. Much of their industry and local expertise sits in the "don't know that I know" basket.

• Technology multiplies capability. Tools from the past few decades let small businesses enter these niches and make money doing it.

TechGrafting moves through five stages: Look, Uncover, Connect, Graft and Test. It brings people and technology together to design and trial practical solutions, creating new products, services and ways of working.

The aim is not technology for its own sake or growth at any cost. It's about making previously impractical ideas viable, strengthening existing businesses and creating lasting economic and social value.

About Peter

Peter is principal of Telesis Consulting. He has spent more than 25 years helping small and medium-sized businesses adapt to economic and technological change.

From 2006 to 2015, Peter was a Business Adviser with the Federal Government's Enterprise Connect program. He carried out more than 100 business reviews of small and medium businesses across the Central West of New South Wales, advising owners on how to stay viable in the long term. As Regional Facilitator for the Lithgow region, he worked with local businesses, councils and other stakeholders to help the region move away from relying on commodities.

Since 2020, his Passing the Baton program has focused on business succession. This is a growing challenge for rural and regional communities as baby boomer owners retire.

Jiaqi Liu - La Trobe University, Bendigo

Jiaqi's research spans the intersection of multimodal medical AI, Drug combination Synergy prediction, biomedical knowledge Graph, Medical Image Processing, interpretable machine learning, clinical data processing, with a particular focus on building transparent, reliable, and practically deployable AI solutions.

He'll share what he's working on and insights from his research. Talk Title to be confirmed.

About Jiaqi

Jiaqi is a researcher and engineer at La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, completing an M.Res. in Medical Image Processing. He holds a Master of Science in Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence from Hong Kong Baptist University and was an exchange and research trainee at the University of Tokyo. He was awarded a place in the Istuary-UBC Sauder Innovative Entrepreneurial Elite Program.

Before moving into research, he worked in electrical engineering and PLC-based automation, with hands-on experience in MATLAB/Simulink and LabVIEW.

Outside the lab, his interests run to quantitative investment, ancient writing systems and cuneiform studies, kendo and chado.

Thank you to our regular sponsors:

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