Alexander
Pappas

I am a workforce analyst at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank who also ships AI products. By day I own operational analytics across six portfolios and more than 800 FTE, Adelaide first and now Melbourne. I advised executives on an operating model change that cut contact volume and staffing cost with no measurable customer impact, freeing roughly six FTE, and I replaced a proposed vendor tool with an in-house process that avoided about US$15k a year in licence cost. The recommendations I present sit behind decisions worth millions.

The rest of it is Groundwork Digital Studio, mine. Eight client products on their own domains, and underneath them an agent organisation I built that actually operates the business: scheduled pipelines into a warehouse I query, read-only canaries against each client's production database, a billing check that catches an invoice which failed to generate, and a health doctor that reconciles exit codes against assertions about the data. I built that last part after one pipeline ran green for nine days while writing nothing, because exit code zero looked like success. A job that exits clean and writes nothing now fails loudly.

What I ship is closer to product than to websites. A contract computer vision system for an external client, scoped from a single discovery call and delivered in two days as a working system plus a hosted dashboard: face detection, 128 dimension embeddings, clustering, and nearest neighbour matching against enrolled identities. It measured 0.997 V-measure, precision 1.00 and recall 0.95 on the public LFW benchmark. I label what is measured and what is simulated.

Then: a free tax tool at imsorted.au where a deterministic rules calculator checks and overrides the model's numbers before a user sees them, because a wrong number in that domain has consequences. Receipt reading and menu intake shipped into a catering client's production workflow, feeding a real business process rather than a demo. A CRM for a retaining wall business with a jobs calendar, photo capture, an SMS relay and an AI reply drafter, and a reconciler that catches an alert which silently never sent. A workforce simulator behind a versioned API, where every response carries an engine version and an input hash, and every run replays from a deterministic seed. A retrieval engine over my own archive, 4,635 chunks from about 600 files, embedded locally on purpose so a private corpus never leaves my machine. And a closed loop that scores every motion effect on this page against a measured floor before it is allowed to ship. I built that harness before I built the page.

The part I like telling people is how it started. I set the studio up to pay for my own AI usage, tokens first and then hardware. I wanted to build with these things faster than I could afford to, so I went and found work that would fund it, and the work turned into a business.

Seven years inside Australian banking and government operations sits under all of it. That is where I learned what a wrong number costs, because I was the one who had to report it. What I care about is shipping things a business actually uses. An impressive one-off is not the point. An image is an image and the gap is code, so I would rather build the thing that does the work than the thing that looks like the work.

1. Mar 2026 – nowFounder and engineer, Groundwork Digital Studio eight client products, built and operated on retainer
2. 2023 – nowSenior Workforce Analyst, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Adelaide, then Melbourne. Six portfolios, 800+ FTE, executive and board level
3. 2019 – 2023Dept for Infrastructure and Transport (Service SA), Adelaide frontline top performer, 30% of all customers at an eight-person centre, then assistant manager, then workforce planning analyst across 300+ FTE at 22 metro and regional centres
4. 2017 – 2019Member Service Consultant, Credit Union SA, Adelaide contact centre lending and insurance, fraud identification