Build Club, the US-based, Australian-born AI learning community, has launched Solaris AI, an AI accelerator for companies to reduce the time taken for organisational AI transformation from a year to a month.
Founder Annie Liao said Solaris AI delivers fundamentally different approach to enterprise AI adoption, eschewing training programs that rely on generic use cases requiring teams to figure out applications themselves, and replacing them with a desktop agent that sits directly on employees’ desktops to observe how they work.
The agent watches workflows in real-time, tracking repetitive tasks, identifying bottlenecks, and analysing decision points to diagnose where AI can help.
She believes that while most enterprises have access to powerful AI tools, few have turned that investment into meaningful productivity gains, pointing to MIT’s Project NANDA, which found that around 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail, largely because teams don’t know how to apply AI to their day-to-day workflows or implement the right level of control.
“Most organisations are trying to solve the wrong problem,” Liao said.
“They’re chasing better AI models when the real issue is adoption. Teams are drowning in tool options with no clear path forward. Solaris cuts through the noise by diagnosing where AI actually helps in your workflows, then teaching teams to build with project based learning with industry leading tools.”
The platform baselines AI fluency across organisations, maps role-specific workflows, and identifies critical review points needed to give leadership the operational intelligence via a three-stage process that starts with diagnosing workflows first to find where AI actually moves the needle, the upskilling teams through hands-on projects, and finally deploying to production with measurable outcomes.
Projects are co-built with AWS and leading AI toolmakers, including Build Club’s new partner, workflow agentic action engine, Manus AI. Their first combined initiative is the Manus Academy, a free, open-access learning program that teaches learners not just what AI is, but what AI can actually do in their role.
Manus cofounder Tao Zhang says capability must be distributed, not centralised.
“AI shouldn’t be gated behind technical expertise,” he said.
“An analyst in Melbourne or a founder in Perth should have the same access to agentic capability as someone in San Francisco. Open-sourcing this academy makes capability a public good.”
Build Club was founded in 2023 as a side hustle for Liao, working with friends on AI projects over weekends, and has grown to become one of the world’s largest AI communities, now operating in 50 cities.
Build Club raised $1.75 million in a pre-Seed round led by Airtree and Blackbird in 2024.
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