Neural Notes: Dragonfly Thinking's next steps after inaugural AI Sprint victory

Welcome back to Neural Notes, a weekly column where I look at some of the most interesting AI news of the week. In this edition: Dragonfly Thinking co-founder and director, Anthea Roberts, on winning Australia’s inaugural AI Sprint and plans for the future.

Dragonfly Thinking was one of three winners of the AI sprint, which was run by the National AI Centre, Stone & Chalk, and Google Cloud. It will receive $300,000 worth of research support as well as facilitation services from the CSIRO’s SME Connect.

The other winners include the NDIS guidance system, Kindship, and tax copilot, Empathetic AI, who will each receive $100,000 of support.

Dragonfly was co-founded by Anthea Roberts and Miranda Forsyth — both professors at ANU — and is dedicated to helping decision-makers navigate complex situations with advanced AI tools.

“We provide an AI tool to apply our trademarked Risk, Reward and Resilience (RRR) framework, enabling decision-makers to understand problems more holistically and act with greater foresight,” Roberts said to SmartCompany.

Key features include issue formulation, driver analysis, connection mapping, intervention assessment, system dynamics and scenario development.

“By integrating these insights into one coherent picture, we are enabling individuals and organisations to build a shared understanding of complex problems, think more holistically, and act more strategically,” Roberts said.

Dragonfly Thinking is already making strides in both government and private sectors. It plans to start pilot programs later in the year led by the Department of Industry, Science, and Resources (DISR). It has also received interest from a variety of private sector organisations, including those in financial services and consulting spaces.

“We’re starting with government pilots because the government knows us very well and has been supportive of the Risk, Reward, and Resilience framework,” Roberts said.

The effect of accelerator programs on Dragonfly Thinking’s prototype

Dragonfly participated in three accelerator programs simultaneously, which has had a significant effect on Dragonfly Thinking’s approach to its prototypes.

These programs included the AI Sprint, the CSIRO ON Accelerate program as well as a defence-focused accelerator.

“We’re also in the Trailblazers for Defence program because what we do has very strong implications for intelligence analysis,” Roberts said.

“You’re not just thinking about traditional security, you’re thinking about economic security, the role of climate change and the role of mass migrations — all sorts of things that are now intersecting in terms of the way that we should be thinking about security.”

According to Roberts, participation in the accelerators provided invaluable insight that will help the future trajectory of the business.

“The combination of doing these three accelerator programs has absolutely transformed our approach,” Roberts said.

“Not only do you get a lot of advice and mentoring, but it brings a lot of the pain points to an earlier stage,” Roberts shared.

Roberts said this allowed Dragonfly to resolve or create roadmaps for dealing with issues much sooner than it would have been otherwise able to do.

Future plans and R&D Development

The R&D funding from the AI Sprint program will drive several key developments from Dragonfly Thinking.

One major focus is the enhancement of its multi-lens analysis tool, which is designed to provide deeper analytical capabilities, allowing users to gain more nuanced insights into complex problems.

Another significant area of development is document ingestion and reasoning. Enhancements in this area will enable the AI to process and reason across large datasets and documents, making the tools highly customisable for specific user needs.

This will allow for personalised analysis, leveraging users’ particular document sets to deliver more relevant and precise insights.

Additionally, Dragonfly Thinking is focusing on developing coordinated workflows among multiple AI assistants and human users. This integration aims to optimise the decision-making process, combining the strengths of both AI and human input.

“We want to create these agentic workflows… bringing together their different specialties at different points in the process,” Roberts said.

Looking ahead, Dragonfly Thinking also sees potential in expanding to direct-to-consumer applications. While the initial focus remains on B2B and government pilots, the consumer market presents a significant opportunity for future growth.

Roberts mentioned the diverse use cases already emerging, from investment advice to personal business ventures.

“We’re seeing people use it for all sorts of personal inquiries… there really is an ability to also do this at a consumer level,” Roberts said.

“One of our friends put in how to make a small blueberry farm economically viable. Somebody put in one about what sort of investing to do in today’s current climate of geopolitical risk and climate change. We’ve had people putting questions about whether or not they should do online dating, or whether or not they should compete in international championships for jiu jitsu as they get older.”

The vision for Dragonfly Thinking is to pioneer a new frontier in what it calls Think Tech — technology that helps people think better when dealing with complexity.

“Our aim is to scale our business so that we can get our AI tools in the hands of many individuals and organisations so that everyone can unlock the power of Dragonfly Thinking,” Roberts said.

Other AI news this week:

Speaking of accelerators, Google Australia has launched one for AI startups.
McDonald’s has McCanned its AI drive-thru just a couple of years after introducing them. I guess people were not, in fact, lovin’ it.
Sakana AI is on track to become a unicorn a mere year after launching. But what does this Tokyo-based company actually do and why are people saying it’s a rival to OpenAI?
A brand new Aussie startup called TrueState is claiming that it can help businesses build AI apps in mere days. And it’s already raised $1.5 million to do it.
In a win for hardware startups, Andromeda Robotics has raised $3 million for its AI-powered Abi robot that provides companionship and support to aged care facilities and hospitals.
Perplexity is cutting Google’s lunch with its new factual queries that allow users to search for the current temperature and currency conversions.
The world premiere of a movie written by ChatGPT has been cancelled after backlash. The director has since spoken out about this, saying that the point of The Last Screenwriter was to start a conversation about the impact of AI on the film industry.