- Applications have closed on SMEC AI’s AI Pathfinder program with more than 1,500 founders from health, mining, law, disability services and a dozen other fields, the largest cohort of AI founders assembled in Australia.
- The program starts tomorrow and culminates in a national AI Makers Expo in Melbourne and Sydney in early December.
Applications for the fifth cohort of AI Pathfinder, the free eight-week program that helps people with industry experience turn an idea into a working AI product, closed this week, with more than 1,500 Australians signed up. SMEC AI set a target of 1,500 when the intake opened. It is the largest cohort of AI founders in the country and nearly three times the size of any previous intake. The cohort begins tomorrow, 21 October 2026.
Pathfinder is run by SMEC AI, an AI Adopt Centre funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. Across its first four cohorts, 502 people have completed the program. Participants attend eight live online workshops with weekly office hours, build a minimum viable product, test it with real customers and learn to pitch it.
SMEC AI Managing Director, Andrew Lai, said the response showed how many Australians want to build with AI themselves.
“We set ourselves a target of 1,500 applicants from the very beginning, and we are extremely pleased to have reached it. That is the largest group of AI founders ever brought together in this country. It shows the tremendous interest among Australians in not only adopting AI but in becoming a nation of makers, not takers. You no longer need to be a technologist to start an AI company, you just need to have domain knowledge, and Australia has plenty of that,” Lai said.
The founders coming through the program bring that domain knowledge from a wide range of industries. Participants are building AI products for legal and compliance work, NDIS support coordination, mining services, utilities and asset management, property, lending, wealth management, workplace training, career development, sustainable retail and much more.
“The people who know exactly what’s broken in an industry are the ones who’ve worked in it for twenty years. Give a learning designer, a lawyer or a disability support coordinator the right tools and eight weeks of structure, and they’ll build the fix themselves,” Lai said.
Past participants describe the program as the point where an idea became a business.
Pamela Frost spent 35 years in capability development before founding Adapt & Thrive, a career intelligence platform of eight AI-enabled apps built around an AI agent called Crystal. She taught herself to build with AI and says the program gave her a steep learning curve and a community of founders she could meet in person.
“I don’t have any coding background. Zero. I struggle to use the mobile phone at times, but I have been able to create code and do all of these amazing things, and it’s self-taught, so it’s really quite amazing,” said Frost.
Yavuz Uragun came to the program from automation work in the solar industry and went on to found URauto.ai, a no-code platform where AI agents build and deploy business applications.
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“It’s been extremely valuable in deciding whether I was going to become an entrepreneur or a startup founder,” said Uragun.
The intake comes as the Federal Government pushes for Australia to build AI products as well as adopt them. In a February speech to Australian Business Economists, Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton said the Government wants Australians to be makers of AI and not only takers, and called for the country to back its own founders.
Lai said the intake showed that the appetite to build was already there.
“Data centres and computing power matter, but most of the economic value in AI sits in the applications built on top of them. The Australians using AI to solve real problems in their industries and in small businesses are the ones who’ll do the most for our economy. More than 1,500 people signing up to build in eight weeks is that argument in practice,” said Lai.
The National AI Centre describes AI Adopt Centres as “designed to help small and medium businesses move from interest to action”.
Lee Hickin, Executive Director of the National AI Centre said, “We are always excited to see Australian founders come together, seeing more than 1,500 sign up to this program that supports our national AI capability growth, shows the appetite for practical, hands-on support. Programs like AI Pathfinder help people with deep industry knowledge turn it into products that serve Australian businesses.”
The cohort will culminate in the AI Makers Expo, a national event in Melbourne and Sydney in early December where startups from the current cohort and earlier alumni exhibit what they have built. It will feature exhibitor booths, talks and panels, and a closing pitch event.
“The Expo is our chance to show the country what these founders have built. A lot of them started with an idea and no code. By December they’ll be standing next to a working product,” said Lai.
Applications for this cohort of AI Pathfinder have closed. Details of future cohorts are at smecai.au/ai-pathfinder.
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