Monash's Blueprint for AI Readiness with Cliff Ashford

Monash's Blueprint for AI Readiness with Cliff Ashford

Show Resources:

Follow Jono Staff on LinkedIn

Follow Naran McClung on LinkedIn

Cloud Reset's YouTube Channel

Contact us at enquiries@macquariecloudservices.com with any questions, suggestions, or corrections.

And don't forget to rate/review!

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Cloud Reset, we sit down with Cliff Ashford, Senior Director at Monash University, to dive into what it really takes to make a university data- and AI-ready. Cliff shares hard-earned lessons from leading a full-scale digital transformation—from overhauling Monash's 25-year-old student management system to building a cloud-native data lakehouse with Databricks.

We cover:

  • Why real AI success starts with governance—years in advance

  • The shift from legacy platforms to agentic models and LLMs

  • Building an institution-wide data model that's both secure and open

  • Democratising access to data across all departments, not just IT

  • Why HR and education teams were the fastest adopters of generative AI

  • Monash's vision for peer-level AI assistants that enhance—not replace—staff

  • How AI will reshape student experiences through simulated scenarios and real-time models

Cliff also shares how Monash built safe-by-design infrastructure that enables innovation without compromising on data ethics or control. His favourite project? A fully governed, infinitely scalable data lakehouse that opens AI capabilities to the whole university.

🎧 Tune in now to hear how one of Australia's leading institutions is turning data into their biggest strategic asset.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(34)

Forward Deployed Engineers Aren't New. So Why Is Big Tech Spending Billions on Them? With Faith Rees | Ep. 18

Forward Deployed Engineers Aren't New. So Why Is Big Tech Spending Billions on Them? With Faith Rees | Ep. 18

Between May and July this year, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft all put billions of dollars behind the same idea: engineers who sit inside the customer's business and build alongside the people w...

23 Sep 53min

SCX.ai and the Mission to Build Australia's Sovereign AI With David Keane | Ep. 17

SCX.ai and the Mission to Build Australia's Sovereign AI With David Keane | Ep. 17

SCX.ai listed a week before this recording, and on the morning of the record the Sydney Morning Herald ran a front page calling AI the most important sovereignty issue for Australians since the Secon...

3 Sep 54min

Telstra Went Dark, Mythos Is Hunting, and Why Technical Debt Should Be a Board-Level KPI | Ep. 16

Telstra Went Dark, Mythos Is Hunting, and Why Technical Debt Should Be a Board-Level KPI | Ep. 16

Episode overview AI adoption is the number one priority for Australian IT leaders, and that is exactly why the unglamorous work of replacing what no longer works keeps sliding down the list. Meanwhile...

28 Juli 32min

The Channel Strategy Most Vendors Get Wrong, With Vic Guerrero | Ep. 15

The Channel Strategy Most Vendors Get Wrong, With Vic Guerrero | Ep. 15

In February 2026, roughly 285 billion US dollars fell off software valuations in 48 hours, on the theory that AI would gut per-seat SaaS. NinjaOne sells per-seat SaaS and is growing about 70 percent a...

8 Juli 57min

Is AI Creating a Crisis of Purpose in IT? With Luke Clifton | Ep. 14

Is AI Creating a Crisis of Purpose in IT? With Luke Clifton | Ep. 14

The IT industry is shedding jobs to cost-cutting, AI restructuring and the usual business cycles, and the man who chairs the Australian Men's Shed Association thinks the real cost, what it does to peo...

16 Juni 45min

Broken Things. Human Reasons | Ep. 13

Broken Things. Human Reasons | Ep. 13

Twenty years ago, the IT professional's primary qualification was confidence. Nobody had the context to evaluate you. You showed up, tried a reboot, and if it worked, you were a genius. This is the ep...

21 Maj 44min

$10M ARR With 15 People | Jason Serda on How AI Is Rewriting Australia's Startup

$10M ARR With 15 People | Jason Serda on How AI Is Rewriting Australia's Startup

Episode overview  Australia's startup market just hit an inflection point. $503 million raised across 25 rounds in the first two months of 2026.  Twenty five per cent up on the year before.  US vent...

28 Apr 51min

The Cloud Left 70% of the World Behind. This Guy's Coming to Fix It. | Ep. 11

The Cloud Left 70% of the World Behind. This Guy's Coming to Fix It. | Ep. 11

The cloud was supposed to connect everyone. It didn't.  When the hyperscalers built their massive data centers, they reached about 30% of the world and called it a day. The other 70%? Left behind. A...

1 Apr 45min

Populärt inom Business & ekonomi

framgangspodden
varvet
rss-jossan-nina
badfluence
24fragor
rss-borsens-finest
avanzapodden
svd-tech-brief
uppgang-och-fall
rss-inga-dumma-fragor-om-pengar
rss-kort-lang-analyspodden-fran-di
tabberaset
lastbilspodden
fill-or-kill
rss-dagen-med-di
rikatillsammans-om-privatekonomi-rikedom-i-livet
rss-veckans-trade
rss-wallnor-pm
borsmorgon
bathina-en-podcast