Pathfinder is run by the Small to Medium Enterprise Centre of AI (SMEC AI), an AI Adoption Centre delivered under the Australian Government’s AI Adopt program. It’s free, delivered online, and open to people already working in an industry or running a business, not just tech founders, and is designed to solve real business problems.
SMEC AI managing director Andrew Lai said the program seeks to answer a question the current debates about AI has largely skipped.
“The government has been clear that Australia should be a nation of makers and not just takers. There has never been a better time for Australians to build,” he said.
“With that said, you no longer need to be a technologist to start an AI company, you just need to have domain knowledge. Australia has hundreds of thousands of people who know a problem worth solving inside out and have never once thought of themselves as a founder. That is the gap Pathfinder was built for, and it is why we are opening it as wide as we can this time.”
The program focuses on the layer of the AI economy that captures the most value and currently has the least support – people who build products on top of AI, rather than the underlying infrastructure.
The four previous cohorts have produced 502 graduates. Applications for cohort 5 close on October 16, kicking off on October 21, and concluding with a showcase in December.
Lai, who delivers the program with Amir Nissen, said that over the eight weeks, participants aim to build a minimum viable product, apply AI tools, validate the idea with real customers, talking with them about it, then pitch an AI startup.
“Some of them come in with an idea and leave with a business,” he said. Others find out in week three that the idea was wrong, which is also worth eight weeks of anyone’s time.”
aXai founder Annette Andersen, who builds accessible tech for people with disabilities, joined Pathfinder as a solo, self-taught developer.
“I normally would go into a situation like that and listen and never meet anybody, but I networked with heaps of people very fast,” she said.
“It was the sort of stuff that you won’t get in a university course.”
Apply for the AI Pathfinder program here.
