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 new “moats” are in an AI-first world (data, verticalisation, expertise)
• The rise of usage-based pricing and token-driven business models
• How AI is reshaping product development, engineering, and startup costs
• Why great engineers still matter — and what skills actually endure
• How founders should think about AI today (and why it’s no longer optional)

They also explore:

• The future of AI pricing — why intelligence gets cheaper, but better models cost more
• Whether AGI is close (and why definitions matter)
• The role of DeepMind as Google’s research engine
• Why AI adoption is still uneven — and why most people aren’t using it deeply (yet)
• How founders and investors should evaluate AI companies in a noisy market

Ella brings a practical, engineering-first perspective with clear takeaways for founders, operators, and investors navigating the AI shift.

Quick Fire Round
📚 Book recommendation – Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
🎧 Podcast recommendation – Latent Space (AI engineering deep dives)
🗞️ News source – Alpha Signal (AI research + repo summaries)
👩‍💼 Favourite leader – Lila Ibrahim (COO, DeepMind / Chief AI Readiness Officer)
🛠️ Productivity tool – Gemini CLI (with strong context engineering)
📺 TV / entertainment – Married at First Sight (pure brain-off viewing)

A sharp, grounded conversation on where AI is actually delivering value — and what to do about it.