Perth AI x Build Club – Tales from USA recap

We were extremely grateful to have Alex Bertram 🌏, Tim de Boer, and Rajat (Raj) Saddi join our interactive panel session to discuss what they learned about opportunities, market dynamics, and cultural differences between working in the US and Perth.

Alex is General Manager – Americas at Greenroom Robotics, a maritime autonomy company. A former Perth local, he’s back in Perth for a short visit.

Tim de Boer is Founder and CEO of Interfuze and Raj Saddi is a principal consultant, both with a long history in Perth’s IT industry. Tim and Raj recently travelled to San Francisco for AI Engineer World Fair. Tim also spent time in SF back in 2000 on the roll out of the city’s Australian built transit system.

Takeaways from our panel

• 🔹 AI engineering is now its own discipline — jargon, norms, and a "100mph" sharing culture across founders, enterprises, and universities.
• 🔹 Teams are shrinking to pods: PM + lead + AI agents, with senior engineers shipping solo and facing customers directly. Failure cases now matter more than wins.
• 🔹 The bottleneck has flipped — building is easy, code volume is exploding. Efficiency, not output, is becoming the real differentiator.
• 🔹 US vs AU gap isn't really about tech — it's mindset. The US dives in; Australia hesitates on governance and risk. Meanwhile our liability and data rules (especially in health/education) are genuinely stricter and slower to move.
• 🔹 This isn't a bubble, it's a gearshift. Expertise is accessible in months, not years — we're standing on the shoulders of giants and accelerating fast.
• 🔹 Best advice from the room: go see it firsthand (SF, or a regional hub like Singapore if budget's tight), and start testing monetization now — the "how do we build it" question is basically solved.

AIE is heading to Sydney next — worth watching for anyone who missed SF.

Thanks to everyone who spent their evening with us and all the questions! Thanks for watching the photo slide-show and taking the ‘who’s who’ quiz!!

Event Gallery