Open The Pod Bay Doors

In this episode of Open the Pod Bay Doors, Ian Gardiner sits down with Ella Greer, AI Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, for a deep dive into how AI is actually being built, deployed, and scaled inside real businesses today. Ella works hands-on with some of Australia’s leading companies — from startups to enterprise — helping them design and implement AI roadmaps. This conversation cuts through the hype and focuses on what’s really happening on the ground: from early experimentation to production-scale AI systems. They cover: The shift from AI experimentation to real-world deployment and scale What an “AI Customer Engineer” actually does inside Google Why startups are still the most exciting (and fastest-moving) AI adopters What “agents” and “agentic systems” really mean — explained simply  How companies are moving from proof-of-concept to real business outcomes Why the SaaS model is under pressure — and what replaces it Where the n