Dr Wilson Wong, data and AI executive, Melbourne

Research rigour. Operator accountability.

I lead data and AI functions that earn their keep: research turned into production systems, governed by guardrails that hold, and accountable to the P&L.

See the track record Connect on LinkedIn
Dr Wilson Wong
  • GM, Data and AI, Probe CX
  • PhD in AI, 1,700+ citations
  • Adjunct Industry Associate Professor, RMIT
  • Previously Xero, Go1, SEEK and ASUS

Track record

Data and AI that earns its keep: built, governed and measured in commercial terms.

  • Probe CXNPS doubled, complaints down 96%

    A generative AI insights solution built by my Data and AI team. It tags every customer call and chat with 95% accuracy and saves more than 700 hours a year. Case study

  • Probe CXAustralia’s first CX provider certified to ISO/IEC 42001

    I instigated and co-led the certification to the global AI management standard with the CISO, and founded and chair the AI Risks and Ethics Committee that oversees it.

  • Probe CXAI from pilot to production

    I direct the AI Innovation Hub, taking solutions from proof of concept to enterprise production, including a human-in-the-loop agentic content engine.

  • SEEK4× click-throughs, 6× job applications

    Search improvements proven in A/B tests on hard-to-match job searches, from an ARC Linkage project I was Partner Investigator on. I then led the replacement of SEEK’s core job search engine with no drop in user experience or commercial metrics. RMIT case study

  • Go1Searches with no results down 58%, conversions per user up 28%

    From search and recommendation improvements my team shipped in six months. Both figures came from better matching of one-word searches. Separately, topic-based recommendations lifted conversions per user by 18.5%.

  • XeroProduct analytics strategy, adopted company-wide

    I wrote Xero’s first product analytics strategy, proved it in one division, then rolled it out across Xero. Alongside it, I sponsored the rebuild of the in-product tracking platform for Xero’s 100+ product teams and designed its experimentation programme.

Point of view

I write on LinkedIn about running AI as a business asset, and about growing the people who build it.

Enterprise AI

The AI Industrialist

Treating AI as an industrial-grade asset: engineered for reliability, governed with hard guardrails, and accountable to the P&L.

12 posts on LinkedIn

If you aren't mapping your tokens to a specific line item, you aren't building an asset, you're funding a hobby.
From The Digital Value Tree #1
See all 12 posts

Start here

  1. 01Introducing The AI Industrialist series

The Asset-Grade Blueprint

  1. 02Persona-Based Engineering #1: generic tools vs augmented roles
  2. 03Persona-Based Engineering #2: the Synthesiser and the Navigator
  3. 04Persona-Based Engineering #3: the Analyst
  4. 05Deterministic guardrails: governance as a speed hack
  5. 06The Digital Value Tree #1: where the value lives
  6. 07The Digital Value Tree #2: the industrialist's tax

The financial architecture of enterprise AI

  1. 08The unit economics of AI/ML assets
  2. 09The hidden line item on your cloud bill
  3. 10Writing off defunct models

Governance

  1. 11Certainty in the age of probabilistic AI
  2. 12Architecting the agentic red lines

Growing senior talent

The Plateau-Breaker

The non-technical shifts in communication, accountability and influence that move a senior expert into a trusted partner role.

8 posts on LinkedIn

Follow me on LinkedIn for new posts.

Speaking

Keynotes, roundtables, panels and university lectures on getting real value from data and AI.

  • 12guest lectures and sessions at RMIT University since 2017
  • 600+students in a single lecture cohort
  • 13research papers presented in person at international conferences
  1. Apr 2025
    Roundtable talkThe bad and the ugly in data value creationData Minds Talk roundtable for senior data leaders, hosted by Halcyon Knights. Read the recap
  2. Dec 2019
    KeynoteFindability and discoverability in learning and employmentADCS 2019, the Australasian Document Computing Symposium, UTS Sydney
  3. May 2026
    Host and moderatorFrom potential to proof: demystifying the tier-1 hiring processPanel with Databricks leaders, formerly of Google, Cisco, Deloitte and KPMG. Hosted by RMIT’s RAIsE Hub for data science and AI capstone students
  4. Jul 2017
    Leadership sessionBreakthrough thinking: the what, why and learnings on howCoca-Cola Amatil New Zealand

My RMIT guest lectures span the Postgraduate Project in Data Science and AI, Case Studies in Data Science, and The AI/Data Science Professional. The talks above are a selection.

From research lab to P&L

Twenty years across research and industry: the depth to know what AI can do, and the accountability to make it pay.

Roles

  • GM, Data and AIProbe CX, 2024 to present, after Head of AI and Advanced Analytics from 2023. Leads data, BI and AI, and the AI Innovation Hub
  • GM, Data Science and ExperimentationXero, 2021 to 2023. Co-authored the operating model for product analytics with the Executive GM of Data
  • Head of DataGo1, 2019 to 2021. Built Go1’s first data science practice
  • Search QualitySEEK, 2014 to 2018. Built SEEK’s first Search Quality function and led the replacement of its core job search engine
  • Advisory board memberHyfen8, 2023 to 2025, advising the founder of an AI SaaS platform
  • EarlierAI and NLP consultant to ASUS on its first conversational, agentic AI, and postdoctoral research at RMIT and UWA

Research

  • PhD in AI, cited 1,700+ timesThe University of Western Australia. Lead author of an ACM Computing Surveys review, cited 650+ times, on teaching machines to learn knowledge from text, the groundwork for today’s knowledge graphs and grounded AI. Google Scholar
  • Postdoctoral research at RMIT and UWANatural language processing, computer vision, conversational AI and clinical notes. Selected papers: COLING 2012, CIKM 2012 and JASIST 2012 and, on clinical notes, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2011
  • ARC Linkage grant with SEEK, as Partner Investigator$411k from the Australian Research Council, with RMIT and the University of Melbourne, taking research on how people search for jobs into SEEK’s production search. ARC grant record
  • Adjunct Industry Associate Professor, RMITMentoring senior data and AI leaders
Where the work happened
  • Probe CX
  • Xero
  • Go1
  • SEEK
  • Sensis
  • ASUS
  • RMIT
  • UWA

Advisory and mentoring

Alongside my executive role, I advise leaders and mentor data and AI professionals through Wilson Wong Consulting.

For leaders

One-to-one programmes on taking AI into production and on proving the return of a data function: The AI Industrialist and The Data ROI Blueprint.

For people building careers

Mentoring for senior specialists moving into strategic roles, and for graduates going after a first role: The Plateau Breaker and The Pre-Career Crucible.

See the programmes Free AI business case template

Questions people ask

Who is Wilson Wong?

Dr Wilson Wong is a Melbourne-based data and AI executive. He is GM of Data and AI at Probe CX and an Adjunct Industry Associate Professor at RMIT, holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from The University of Western Australia with research cited more than 1,700 times, and has led data and AI functions at Xero, Go1 and SEEK.

What has Wilson Wong delivered as a data and AI leader?

At Probe CX, a generative AI insights solution built by his team doubled NPS and cut complaints by 96%, and he instigated and co-led the company's certification as Australia's first CX provider to ISO/IEC 42001. At SEEK, search improvements lifted click-throughs four-fold and job applications six-fold in A/B tests, and he led the replacement of SEEK's core job search engine with no drop in user experience or commercial metrics. At Go1, search improvements his team shipped cut searches with no results by 58% and lifted conversions per user by 28%.

How does Wilson Wong approach enterprise AI?

He treats AI as an industrial-grade asset rather than an experiment. His Asset-Grade Blueprint has three principles: persona-based engineering, so tools are built around real roles; deterministic guardrails, so governance speeds delivery rather than slowing it; and the Digital Value Tree, which ties every AI investment to a line on the profit and loss.

Does Wilson Wong speak at events?

Yes. He gave the keynote at ADCS 2019, has spoken at data leadership roundtables and led industry sessions, moderated panels, and has given guest lectures at RMIT University since 2017.

Does Wilson Wong offer advisory or mentoring?

Yes, through Wilson Wong Consulting. Programmes for data and AI leaders and for people building careers in data are listed at wilsonwong.ai/mentoring.