Nap Stack

Monica Ly

A five-minute podcast for Australian business leaders navigating AI and data without a technical background. Each episode is one idea you can take into your next meeting: a question worth asking, a claim worth challenging, or a decision worth slowing down. Hosted by Monica Ly, co-founder of EdgeRed (part of The Omnia Collective) — eight years of hands on delivery experience, recorded between baby feeds and naps.

  1. 1 Sept

    EP15: Fix how you work before you fix it with AI | Workflows, culture and productivity

    Host: Monica Ly | Guest Speaker: Kersh, founder of BCD Theatre | Every leader is asking how AI can make their business more productive. The uncomfortable answer: a lot of the productivity problem doesn't sit with the technology. It sits in the workflows AI is being pointed at. Kersh has spent years inside corporate Australia at Woolworths, GetUp and Mamamia, building data analytics functions from the ground up. She now writes and directs theatre, including a comedy about corporate Australia. That vantage point makes her observations sharper than most. Her observations: HR processes have quietly become box-ticking exercises, and AI is being used to strip the last of the humanity out. Some organisations now rank team members by AI credit consumption, as if that's the same as productivity. And the messy, slower human conversations that produce better decisions are quietly being replaced by faster ones that produce merely faster answers. Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP15: Fix how you work before you fix it with AI | Workflows, culture and productivity

  2. 25 Aug

    EP14: Follow the money: where AI budgets are actually coming from | AI spend & funding

    Host: Monica Ly | Guest Speaker: Amir, AI Practice Lead at Dicker Data | Everyone is spending on AI. Almost no one has a dedicated AI budget for it. Which raises a question worth asking: where is the money actually coming from? Amir leads the AI practice at Dicker Data, Australia's largest locally owned tech distributor, and has a view across the market of how organisations are funding their AI initiatives. He joins Monica to unpack the four conversations senior leaders are having right now, why "AI as cost-cutting" is often a permission slip for something else, and how to spot vanity projects before they consume your budget. The framing that stuck: AI has decoupled growth from headcount. The interesting question isn't how to cut staff. It's how to grow without adding them. Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP14: Follow the money: where AI budgets are actually coming from | AI spend & funding

  3. 18 Aug

    EP13: Why speed isn't the AI advantage most leaders think it is | Global AI adoption

    Host: Monica Ly | Guest Speaker: Josh, AI Business Manager at IOC | Australian leaders keep telling themselves their organisations are falling behind on AI. Compared to what, exactly, tends to be less clear. Josh has worked across Sydney, Seoul, London and now Europe, and now deploys AI at an international sporting governing body. He joins Monica with a view of how different markets are actually approaching AI adoption from the inside, and why Australia is closer to Europe on digital governance than most leaders realise. His observations: the US and Europe are running different plays, but neither is slow. Australia has the foundations to be exceptional at applying AI in the industries where we already have real strengths, similar to how Korean companies became global leaders by scaling technologies invented elsewhere. And the advice he gives sporting bodies works everywhere: don't implement AI everywhere. Implement it where it matters most. Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP13: Why speed isn't the AI advantage most leaders think it is | Global AI adoption

  4. 11 Aug

    EP12: Frontier or open source AI: what leaders should actually weigh | AI model selection

    Host: Monica Ly | Someone on your leadership team is about to ask you to choose between a frontier model (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and an open source one (Llama, Mistral). Most leaders frame this as a technology decision. It isn't. Monica unpacks why the choice is actually a commercial one, using the analogy that keeps landing: a frontier model is like ordering from a restaurant, running an open source model is like running your own kitchen. Both have real costs, just different ones. The three things to weigh: cost (Canva just cut revenue forecasts because their AI features got too expensive to run on frontier), data sovereignty (the Australian government banned DeepSeek in early 2025 for exactly this reason), and whether your team has the skills to actually own an open source model in production. Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP12: Frontier or open source AI: what leaders should actually weigh | AI model selection

  5. 4 Aug

    EP11: The unglamorous work that decides who wins with AI | AI foundations & governance

    Host: Monica Ly | Guest Speaker: Vivian, Enterprise Account Executive at Databricks | The organisations getting the most value from AI in Australia won't win because of flashy models. They'll win because of the unglamorous work they did before AI was even on the agenda. Vivian Vo, Enterprise Account Executive at Databricks and spends her days in conversation with Australian tech leaders, joins Monica to unpack what "getting it right" actually looks like, and why the companies stuck right now are the ones that skipped the foundation work. Her observations: security and governance dominate the CIO conversation because data lives in silos, and getting it wrong stops everything else. The vendor question most leaders don't ask isn't about the tech, it's about the disruption. What changes for people and process when this platform lands. And the line that keeps coming back: technology is the easiest part. Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP11: The unglamorous work that decides who wins with AI | AI foundations & governance

  6. 28 July

    EP10: AI won't break your tech. It'll break your operating model | AI ownership & operating models

    Host: Monica Ly | Guest Speaker: Anthony, partner at ADAPT | Most leaders still treat AI as a technology problem. The ones getting stuck are the ones who never moved past that framing. Anthony Saba, partner at ADAPT and someone who speaks to hundreds of Australian executives every year, joins Monica to explain why the thing AI is most likely to break isn't the technology, it's the operating model you built the business around. His take on the AI ownership question everyone's debating: it has to be CEO-led, then three executives need to be aligned like the three keys on a nuclear submarine. The CIO or CTO owns the tech foundations. The CFO, because AI challenges how work gets funded. The COO, to orchestrate the workflow redesign. His advice on where to start: don't treat it as an AI use case. Pick one meaningful end-to-end workflow and redesign it from first principles, with intelligence built in from the start, not bolted on at the edges. You learn far more from that than from proving something is technically possible. Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP10: AI won't break your tech. It'll break your operating model | AI ownership & operating models

  7. 21 July

    EP09: Time saved isn't the AI business case | AI use cases & business value

    Host: Monica Ly | Every AI pilot ends with the same slide: look how much time this will save us. Almost no one asks what happens next. Monica breaks down why "hours saved" isn't the destination of a good AI business case, it's the starting point. Using an analogy from the dashboard era (when reports got automated, nobody went home earlier — they just stopped building reports and started reading them), she unpacks why capacity created isn't the same as value delivered, and what leaders should push their teams to answer before they sign off on a use case. The test: when someone brings you a proposal built on hours saved, spend less energy checking the maths and more on the sentence that usually isn't there. What will people actually do with that time? Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP09: Time saved isn't the AI business case | AI use cases & business value

  8. 6 July

    EP08: Is AI actually in the job - or just in the title? | AI hiring & recruitment

    Host: Monica Ly | Guest Speaker: Michelle, Director at The Onset | Most leaders assume an AI job title means an AI job. Often it doesn't. Michelle Rubinstein, Director at The Onset and a recruiter for over 25 years, joins Monica to unpack what's really behind the explosion in AI hiring - Head of AI roles up 28% in a year, AI Engineer roles up 37% - and the sign-off leaders keep getting wrong. Most approve headcount based entirely on their team's recommendation, without asking what business problem the hire is meant to solve. The test Michelle uses: can this person tell you how they cut costs, sped up a process, or generated revenue with AI - or do they only talk about models and prompts? If it's the latter, the salary is the cheapest part of what a bad hire costs. Five minutes. One idea. Something to bring to your next leadership conversation. Have a question or topic for Monica? Visit edgered.com.au/contact-us or find her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/monica-ly

    EP08: Is AI actually in the job - or just in the title? | AI hiring & recruitment
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About

A five-minute podcast for Australian business leaders navigating AI and data without a technical background. Each episode is one idea you can take into your next meeting: a question worth asking, a claim worth challenging, or a decision worth slowing down. Hosted by Monica Ly, co-founder of EdgeRed (part of The Omnia Collective) — eight years of hands on delivery experience, recorded between baby feeds and naps.

Information

  • Creator
    Monica Ly
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Show Website
    Nap Stack