Build Club says its first enterprise pilots for a new AI upskilling platform are showing tangible returns, highlighted by a Lendi Group trial it’s claimed saved more than 10,000 hours across the biz.
In the pilot, seven non-technical sales associates completed Build Club’s ‘AI Accelerator’ in a week and built customer-support workflows to automate call processes.
Annie Liao, Founder of Build Club, said the pilot with Lendi shows a proof of concept for her model of embedding AI directly into companies.
“The results from the pilot were mindblowing even to us, and show that AI productivity gains are happening now,” she said.
“Companies with targeted upskilling and adoption strategies (not just education) are already winning, we have seen this at Lendi.
“If we can make Australia the first AI-native workforce, we’ll prove to the world that adoption isn’t a decade-long challenge, it’s something any company can do and use as an advantage.”
If Build Club’s self-reported case study holds up at scale, it would put Lendi among the minority of enterprises translating pilots into production.
Research from famed US university MIT last month sent shivers down the spines of AI hype merchants when it pointed to a whopping 95% fail rate for enterprise AI pilots.
The problem, which MIT dubbed the ‘GenAI Divide’, is in the way organisations adapt to tools that are extraordinary for individual use but which beg for adjusted workflows and processes.
Lendi Group has publicly set a goal to become fully AI-native by June 2026 with CEO and co-founder David Hyman telling a staff meeting in August that “agentic AI will be the default in every workflow, decision and experience”.
Lendi senior project manager Bobbie MacDougall has leant into this philosophy.
“For us, it wasn’t about dabbling with AI tools,” said Bobbie. “Our goal is to have AI at the heart of everything we do — products, services, and everyday operations.
“I built my first workflow on Sunday. Suddenly I realised I could automate an entire process in hours instead of days. It felt exciting, not like training — and that excitement spread.”
Build Club has quickly grown as one of Australia’s top AI talent champions, launching its first accelerator last year that saw a cohort of 15 AI startups head to the US to pitch to investors.
In October, it picked up a $1.75 million pre-seed round and has since teamed up with a coalition of AI-first companies including Lovable, with which Build Club was a launch partner of its learning platform.
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