Co-CEO & Founder · Leadership · Sydney
Allan Waddell
Co-CEO and founder of Kablamo. Allan has a long history of senior leadership roles and is passionate to a fault about building and establishing high-impact businesses in the tech domain. He has been working with data and AI at scale since 2005, long before the current wave made it fashionable. He is a strategist and a systems thinker who would rather spend three days reframing a problem than three months building the wrong solution. He built and sold Strut, one of Australia's first AWS systems integrators. Built Firestory, the bushfire intelligence platform used by 80,000 firefighters. Expanded Kablamo to Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Now focused on agentic AI systems and the shift from businesses using AI to businesses built of AI.
In 2017 he brought in Angus Dorney as co-CEO. Waddell is better at the vision, product, and technical side of running a company than the operational side, and will tell you so unprompted. Dorney brought rigour to operations and finance. The partnership worked because the division was clean and the communication was constant. Over the following decade the team grew to more than a hundred people across Australia and Canada, with a throughline across every engagement: connecting data to consumers in powerful ways.
Waddell has been writing about AI since before most enterprise leaders took it seriously. In 2018 he wrote for The Australian about algorithmic bias in criminal sentencing and hiring, asking how we regulate AI decision-making without impairing its value, and whether we could ever know if an AI was telling us the truth or just saying what we wanted to hear. In the same year he wrote about what slime moulds can teach us about intelligence, arguing that a brainless single-celled organism solving the Tokyo rail network should make the industry both humble and curious about where intelligence actually comes from. He has a long-running critique of ERP vendor lock-in that he also first published in 2018, describing it as hostageware and arguing that businesses should always build so they can get their data out, drive requirements from the customer downwards rather than from the ERP upwards, and keep an eye on the exit.
When the 2019/2020 Australian bushfires exposed the limits of existing emergency response technology, Waddell and his team built Firestory, an AI and data platform that turns vast quantities of geospatial and sensor data into decision-making intelligence for fire agencies. Firestory won the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partners Award for Most Innovative AI and ML Solution, secured $500,000 in grants, and grew into a standalone capability within two years. The platform now serves 80,000 firefighters across NSW Rural Fire Service and DEECA Victoria, predicting fire spread in minutes and processing satellite, weather, and terrain data at a resolution 70 times higher than legacy systems.
He did the Black Dog Institute CEO Skydive because he believes business leaders should talk openly about mental health, and found it considerably more terrifying than anything that happens in a boardroom. He has written publicly about the responsibility leaders carry when it comes to the wellbeing of their teams, arguing that there is no organisational gain or personal advancement that can come from overseeing a burnt out workforce.
His thinking on AI safety has been equally direct. When OpenAI launched Operator in early 2025, he wrote a widely shared piece calling it a loaded gun, arguing that handing an AI deep access to your bank details, social media logins and daily routine without adequate guardrails was an experiment with serious security implications that most people were not asking enough questions about.
His current focus is on what he calls the distinction between building a business with AI and building a business of AI. The former bolts intelligence onto existing processes. The latter rebuilds the operating model around intelligence as a core capability. He wrote in late 2024 that traditional software is dying, that in ten years businesses will not buy software but describe what they need and have AI generate it, and that the winners will not own infrastructure but intelligence. He gave himself and Kablamo an eighteen to twenty-four month window to become a brand name in AI or risk becoming another consultancy that used to matter.
The company's values still fit on three words: Make, Heart, Mind. Build things that matter. Care deeply about the humans. Think rigorously about every decision. The ambition has sharpened, but the conviction has not changed since 2015: only engineers with genuine curiosity and deep technical skill can solve the problems that traditional consultancies are content to study.
Waddell is based in Sydney.
