How Pathfindr’s CEO Helps Digital Leaders Unlock Practical AI Adoption

The danger of overthinking AI

For many Australian organisations, AI adoption has stalled—not for lack of interest, but due to inflated expectations of what’s required to begin.

Dawid Naude, founder of Pathfindr and keynote speaker at Digital Edge, says too many digital leaders are over-engineering AI programs before delivering any value.

“They’re treating AI like any other tech initiative—but it’s not. It lies. It’s unpredictable. It’s new. But it’s also incredibly powerful straight out of the box,” he explained.

Rather than waiting for a perfect data environment or building in-house solutions from scratch, Naude says the better move is to “start using tools like GPT or Claude, even just off-the-shelf, securely, and as thought partners.”

The biggest mistake? Delaying action to build internal tools that employees…