Insights
Product, design, AI, and engineering perspectives from our team.
Fine-Tuning Small Language Models for Domain-Specific Tasks
Fine-tuning a small language model can outperform a frontier model on narrow tasks — but only when the task, data, and economics actually justify the overhead. This article covers when fine-tuning makes sense, how to prepare data and evaluate properly, and how to honestly assess the cost trade-off against prompting a frontier model API.
Caching Strategies for LLM Applications: Reducing Latency and Cost
Caching is one of the most underused levers for reducing cost and latency in production LLM applications. This article covers prompt caching, semantic caching, and response caching — what each layer does, when to use it, and how to think about invalidation and observability.
Structured Outputs and Function Calling: Making LLMs Reliable
Structured outputs and function calling are the mechanisms that make LLMs viable in production workflows — but reliable implementation requires deliberate schema design, validation layers, and observability from the start. This guide covers how to use both patterns effectively, when to choose each, and the failure modes that catch teams off-guard at scale.
Agentic RAG: When Retrieval Needs Reasoning
Standard RAG works well when one retrieval pass is enough. Agentic RAG is the architecture for problems that require planning, iterative retrieval, and reasoning over results from multiple sources. This post covers the patterns, the platform options, and the real engineering trade-offs.
Australia's Voluntary AI Safety Standard: A Compliance Checklist
Australia's Voluntary AI Safety Standard sets out ten guardrails for responsible AI adoption. This practical checklist walks Australian businesses through each guardrail — what it requires, what to do, and how to sequence the work based on your current AI maturity.
The EU AI Act: What Australian Software Exporters Must Do Now
The EU AI Act applies to Australian software and AI vendors selling into Europe, regardless of where they are headquartered. This post explains how the risk tiers work, what high-risk obligations actually require, and a practical compliance path for Australian exporters.
AI in the Australian Public Sector: Procurement Realities
Deploying AI in the Australian public sector means navigating procurement panels, the Australian Privacy Principles, data sovereignty requirements, and algorithmic accountability obligations — all before a model runs in production. This post outlines the practical realities for technical leaders working inside or alongside government agencies.
AI in Australian Financial Services: Risk and Compliance
AI offers Australian financial services firms real capability in fraud detection, compliance automation, and customer operations — but only when deployed with a clear view of APRA, ASIC, and Privacy Act obligations. This article covers the primary use cases, the regulatory landscape, and the technical foundations required to get AI into production in a regulated environment.
AI in Australian Professional Services: Legal and Advisory
Mid-market Australian law firms, accounting practices, and advisory businesses are applying AI to document review, research, and client delivery — but the gap between a demo and a production system that handles client data responsibly is significant. This article covers practical use cases, Australian Privacy Principles obligations, and how to think honestly about ROI without overclaiming.