Tom Howard, Head of ANZ, Applied AI at Anthropic.

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Application for Head of ANZ, Applied AI.

Tom Howard.

Founding the Applied AI team for Anthropic in ANZ.

hire-tom-at-anthropic.windyroad.com.au

June 2026 · Sydney

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Sixteen years of pre-sales. Eighteen years inside Australia / New Zealand (ANZ) regulated financial services. Applied AI shipping in production.

Sydney-based. Founder-led direct sales of BWUnit and TIBant from 2010: dozens of paying financial services customers won solo across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the US. Pre-sales Solution Architect work today at Endava on Visa Click to Pay and Passkey. Voder live on the OpenAI Connections marketplace via the Model Context Protocol. agent-plugins running my own Claude Code delivery loop. Teams built and led across super, banking, and rail.

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Applied AI shipping in production. Public artefacts a reviewer can read.

Three live receipts. Voder is in production on the OpenAI Connections marketplace via the Model Context Protocol. agent-plugins is the Claude Code plugin suite I run my own delivery with (architecture governance, ISO 31000 risk, ITIL-aligned workflow). addressr is the Australian address API used in production by Australian services. Not "we should use AI more". Things in production with names and URLs.

Live · June 2026

Voder

Read-only Xero access surfaced through Claude or ChatGPT via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The owner asks "what's owed to me, and when?" and gets the answer in plain English. Live on the OpenAI Connections marketplace. Stack: MCP, Xero API, TypeScript, Next.js, Express, Google Cloud Platform.

Open source

windyroad/agent-plugins

Open-source Claude Code plugin suite I authored and maintain. wr-risk-scorer is the ISO 31000-aligned risk scorer that gates commits and pushes. wr-itil is the ITIL-aligned problem / change / RFC workflow. The toolkit I use to ship Voder, addressr, this site, and the bAIs research.

Public · since 2018

addressr

Australian address validation API. Free and self-hostable from GitHub (110 ★, 23 forks, 43 releases). Hosted as a service (SaaS) on AWS via RapidAPI. 16,473 users (830 active in 30d). Used in production by Australian services.

How I work with Claude today:

Claude Code generates and reviews code on every change to this deck, agent-plugins, Voder, and bAIs. Architecture, scope, safety, and business decisions stay with me. The guardrails (architecture review, JTBD review, risk scoring, voice review) run on every edit. The bottleneck argument holds: better guardrails (evaluations, red-team patterns, human-in-the-loop checks) move the line. I've built a few of those guardrails. I want to help Anthropic's customers build the rest.

hire-tom-at-anthropic.windyroad.com.au 03 / 10

Sixteen years of pre-sales. Solo founder. Solution Architect. Today.

Current customer-facing work, founder-led direct sales from 2010, named consulting bids, and the speaking-room track record that travels alongside.

  1. May 2026 - present Endava · Senior Architect (Manager Level)

    Pre-sales work as part of the Senior Architect remit at Manager Level seniority. Additional Visa Click to Pay (CTP) and Passkey engagements. Regulated ANZ enterprise pre-sales under NDA. Customer-facing technical lead in exec sessions, workshops, and proof-of-concept design.

  2. 2010 - present BWUnit + TIBant · Founder-led direct sales

    Founder. Sole salesperson. Prospecting, demos, technical workshops, contracts, renewals. Dozens of paying FS customers won across APAC, Europe, and the US. Mid six-figure revenue on BWUnit, low six-figure on TIBant. Two customers still live; active sales paused. Sixteen years of pre-sales muscle starts here.

  3. 2013 Consulting pre-sales · Utilities + higher-ed

    Pre-sales lead on multiple ANZ bids. Won the AIMS bid and delivered the engagement. Followed with Essential Energy. UNSW bid: successful proof-of-concept. Carried the technical narrative end to end: discovery, solution design, demo, commercial framing, hand-off to delivery.

  4. 2014 - 2019 AMP + Rabobank · Solution Architect

    Application and Integration Architect, then Solution Architect at AMP. Owned the technical narrative on the "My AMP" rebuild for AMP's 1 million+ customer base. Then Solution Architect at Rabobank for new web and mobile banking channels. SA inside two regulated FS environments.

Talks · 510+ leaders across three rooms:

apidays Melbourne · 2023 · ~300 SlashNEW Newcastle · 2025 · ~150 Newcastle Coder's Group · 2023 · ~60 The Shift · LinkedIn newsletter for engineering leaders
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Inside the rooms Anthropic's ANZ customers live in.

APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) CPS 234. Australian Privacy Principles. Data residency. Anti-money-laundering / counter-terrorism financing (AML / CTF). These aren't abstractions for me. I've sat inside the software development lifecycle (SDLC) reviews, the regulator-facing programs, and the bank-grade payment infrastructure that the JD calls out as the ANZ regulatory landscape.

  1. 2024 - Feb 2026 Westpac

    Project Director on FATCA / CRS (cross-border tax reporting) at Westpac. Led a 50+ person team across business analysis, project management, change, architecture, and delivery. Line-managed the leads of each track. Took entity-customer compliance from 0 to 97 percent in 10 months. 5,300 bankers, 614 branches. Then ran discovery for ongoing know-your-customer (KYC) and AML / CTF reform across two Consumer business units. The regulator-facing programs Anthropic's customers will ask to run on Claude.

  2. 2019 - 2022 Greater Bank

    Digital transformation consultant for a 50+ developer organisation. Designed SDLC controls with the bank's risk team. Deploys to production multiple times per week, all with "no objection" from APRA. Identity and access management (IAM) architecture and staged migration design. APRA CPS 234 territory.

  3. 2011 CSC for BPAY

    One of the architects on the next-generation BPAY hub (Australia's bank-to-bank bill payments scheme). Owned the non-functional requirements: scalability, availability, supportability, performance, resilience. Designed a file-transfer security solution that signs payments record-by-record. The payment-infrastructure context Anthropic enterprise financial services conversations will land in.

  4. 2008 - 2011 NAB / MLC

    Senior Analyst Programmer, then Technical Lead, Integration Services (15+ developers). 20+ BusinessWorks engines in production. Introduced Continuous Integration and automated deployment plans inside a major wealth-management environment.

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Teams built. Teams led. Across super, banking, and rail.

Scope built from scratch (Greater Bank testing team, Fireteam Leads structure) plus existing teams taken over, grown, and led through major programs. Receipts on who was there before, who came in, and the shape on exit.

Westpac FATCA

50+

Cross-functional team across business analysis, project management, change, architecture, delivery. Line-managed the leads of each track. 0 to 97 percent compliance in 10 months.

Pacific National

25+

Rail Systems team lead. Developers, business analysts, and support engineers. 100 → <10 open incidents. Halved the monthly incident rate (80 → 40).

Greater Bank

1 → 9

Permanent testing team built from one tester to nine. Production security vulnerabilities 100s → ~0. Cycle time 50 → 8 days over 21 months.

MLC

15+

Technical Lead, Integration Services Team. 20+ BusinessWorks engines in production. Introduced Continuous Integration and automated deployment plans.

Founding leadership signal: Fireteam Leads at Greater Bank

Lobbied for the Lead role inside the new structure. Once approved, promoted developers from the bench into the Lead position. Multiple times. The structural change outlasted me. Team Topologies was published a month after Fireteams shipped; the field caught up.

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Safety as default. Not as a slide.

Three public artefacts that show how I treat AI safety in the work itself: cognitive-bias research on LLMs, an ISO 31000-aligned risk scorer that gates AI coding workflows, and a truth-standard ledger that gates this deck. The mission resonance Anthropic asks about is in the tooling, not the marketing.

Research

bAIs (bias AI studies)

Reproduced four landmark cognitive-bias experiments on LLMs (Anchoring, Conjunction Fallacy, Sunk Cost, Framing). LLMs show a distinct bias profile, not uniformly better or worse than humans. Then tested Sibony decision-architecture debiasing techniques: 24-27 percent reduction in anchoring bias via Context Hygiene and Premortem prompt design. Research paper drafted.

Open source

wr-risk-scorer

ISO 31000-aligned risk scoring for AI coding workflows. Scores every edit. Gates commits when cumulative risk exceeds your policy threshold. Gates pushes for high-risk changesets. Detects secret leaks before writes. Reviews outbound prose for confidential-information leaks before gh pr, npm publish, or .changeset/*.md reach external surfaces. The guardrails I want for Anthropic's enterprise customers, available today.

In this repo

CLAIMS ledger + truth standard

Every numerical and biographical claim on this deck traces to a verifiable source: LinkedIn, Tom's direct input, or a public record. An agent cannot land a claim without checking the ledger first; a missing source halts the edit. Built this gate after a session generated a year-count that didn't match the FS arc. Factual incorrectness is a massive risk in a hiring-manager artefact. Now it has a control.

Where I draw the line today:

Agents own code generation and code review today, behind architecture, risk, JTBD (jobs-to-be-done), voice-and-tone, style-guide, and accessibility guardrails. Humans own architecture, scope, and business decisions. The bottleneck argument holds: human-pace on those decisions still leaves implementation running at AI pace. Better guardrails (evaluations, red-team patterns, human-in-the-loop checks) move the line further. I've built a few. I want to help Anthropic's customers build more.

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RoboCup 2001 participating people and robots. Seattle, August 2001.

Applied AI. Since 1999.

Applied AI Unit, CSIRO CMIS. The title on the door, twenty-seven years ago.

RoboCup 2001 · CybeRoos in the room. Seattle, August.

2006

Patent

Functional planning system. Learns user usage patterns and plans the best event sequences for a given context. Co-invented with Mikhail Prokopenko et al. at CSIRO; assigned to Canon Inc. US7054849B2.

1999 → 2001

Publications

  • Cyberoos' 2001: "Deep Behaviour Projection" Agent Architecture.
  • Flexible synchronisation within RoboCup environment: a comparative analysis.
  • Cyberoos' 99: Tactical Agents in the RoboCup Simulation League.

1999 → 2005

Applied AI · CSIRO

CybeRoos with the Applied AI Unit, CMIS (CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences). 2nd Pacific Rim and 9th World Cup (2000, 2001). Volunteer Project Leader for the RoboCup Soccer Simulator. C++ on Linux / OS X; Python alongside.

Beyond the lab

Concurrent

BSc Computer Science, Macquarie University. AI Programmer at Team Bondi, NavMesh path-finding in C++. TIBCO Rendezvous Support Engineer across Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux.

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Why this role · why ANZ now

I've been building toward this role.

The role title is "Applied AI". So is the name of the unit at CSIRO CMIS where I worked on autonomous agents in 1999. Sixteen years of pre-sales since then: from founder-led BWUnit sales in 2010 through to Senior Architect (Manager Level) pre-sales at Endava today. Eighteen years inside ANZ regulated financial services. Applied AI shipping in production today (Voder on the OpenAI Connections marketplace, agent-plugins in production). A drafted research paper on LLM cognitive biases and an ISO 31000 risk scorer for AI coding workflows. The arc reads as authentic because it is.

ANZ enterprises (the APRA-supervised banks, the federal and state government departments, the resources majors) are about to do the largest commercial AI rollouts in the region's history. The technical leader Anthropic puts in front of them has to be credible in the regulator-facing room. I have been in that room. I have led 50+ person programs through it.

First 90 days, the shape (not the answer; the room is where the detail lands): name three foundational ANZ regulated customers and the technical thesis that lands each. Hire the first Solutions Architect and Product Engineer against named-account-aligned needs. Stand up the safety-and-evaluation pattern Anthropic Solutions Architects in ANZ use end-to-end, drawing on the wr-risk-scorer / bAIs / CLAIMS-ledger playbook. Let's talk.

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Let's talk.

Direct lines. Sydney time, but I keep US and EU hours often enough that scheduling is easy.