“They did 12 weeks of work in one day”: The Illawarra expert shaping Australia’s AI response
The Illawarra-based AI researcher helping Australia navigate the next wave of artificial intelligence.
Bill Simpson-Young has spent decades at the frontier of artificial intelligence, advising governments, shaping national AI policy and helping Australia navigate one of the fastest technological shifts in history.
But these days, the CEO and co-founder of Gradient Institute calls the Illawarra home.
From his base in Wombarra, Simpson-Young is helping to drive conversations around safe, ethical and responsible AI use across Australia, working closely with the Federal Government, major banks, insurers and some of the country’s largest organisations.
The former machine learning researcher, who has worked in AI since the late 1980s, moved to the Illawarra about two-and-a-half years ago after decades in Sydney.
“I just wanted to live in the bush and near the coast,” he said. “I hadn’t really discovered the Northern Illawarra before. A friend of a friend suggested it, and I ended up living surrounded by trees, but ten minutes from the water. I absolutely love it.”
That quieter coastal backdrop hasn’t slowed his work.
Seven years ago, Simpson-Young and several colleagues founded Gradient Institute, a not-for-profit research organisation focused on ensuring AI systems are developed and deployed safely.
“We were worried about the way AI was going,” he said. “We could see that AI was often being used carelessly by people who didn’t quite understand how it worked.”
Today, Gradient Institute is one of Australia’s leading voices on AI governance. According to the organisation’s newly released 2025 Impact Report, Gradient helped shape Australia’s official AI adoption guidance for business and contributed to international AI safety research and standards development.
The organisation co-developed the Federal Government’s “Guidance for AI Adoption” with the National AI Centre, a framework designed to help businesses safely adopt AI.
“We were trying to make it really easy for Australian companies, particularly small companies, to adopt AI and govern AI well,” Simpson-Young said.
The framework outlines six essential practices for responsible AI governance, including accountability, risk management, transparency and maintaining human oversight.
The guidance also includes practical templates for AI policies, risk screening, and governance processes to help businesses get started quickly.
He warns that the technology comes with real risks, especially as AI agents become more autonomous.
“People think large language models and agents do exactly what you tell them to do. They don’t,” he said. “When you put a prompt into Chat GPT or any general-purpose AI system, it’s a suggestion of what they could do. They can do unexpected things if you don’t have the right protections in place.”
“It’s a real trap for companies,” he said.
That unpredictability is driving much of Gradient’s current work, including research into the risks of “AI agents”, systems capable of acting autonomously and interacting with other systems.
“One of the things we’re working on now is when you’ve got agents interacting with agents between companies,” he said. “What are the different things that can go wrong?”
The organisation is also running education programs for company directors and executives to help them better understand the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
For Simpson-Young, one of the biggest challenges facing businesses right now is understanding where AI can genuinely add value and where the risks sit.
“A lot of people want to use agent technologies, and there’s such a variety of them, going from really low risk to incredibly high risk,” he said. “Sometimes people put everything in the same bucket.”
He said many organisations were also making the mistake of dismissing AI too quickly after a poor first experience.
“A lot of organisations might adopt some fairly standard AI technology and think, ‘Oh, is that all AI is?’ and they don’t find it useful,” he said. “Then they say, ‘We’ve tried AI, and it wasn’t for us.’ But AI is changing so much, and there are so many different technologies and products out there.”
At the same time, he believes businesses that carefully and strategically embrace the technology stand to gain significant productivity advantages.
“There are very affordable options that are incredibly powerful,” he said. “Companies can get massive productivity gains just by using some of these tools properly.”
Simpson-Young said the pace of change in AI over the past six months alone had been staggering.
“You got to a point in about December last year, January this year, where all of a sudden you could get production-quality software being written fully by AI,” he said.
“That simply wasn’t possible before then.”
In one example, he said a software team recently compressed what would normally have been a 12-week development roadmap into a single day using AI coding agents.
“They literally did 12 weeks of work in one day,” he said.
He said the implications for business are enormous.
“It’s so easy to write software now,” he said.
But keeping pace with the rapid evolution of AI is a challenge even for organisations working at the cutting edge of the sector.
“We read research papers. We stay close to a lot of big companies ... we try to stay at the leading edge and always be reading the latest research.”
He said Gradient Institute’s team regularly shares internal research and analysis to monitor developments across the fast-moving AI landscape, while also using AI tools themselves to track emerging technologies and risks.
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