Joël Lignier

Joël has spent twenty years building enterprise systems, thirteen of them designing enterprise platforms for regulated Australian organisations, and since late 2022 has been building production AI agents and the controls that govern them. As enterprises work out what agentic workflows mean for security, trust, access, delegated authority and auditability, Joël has been hands on — building and testing how it works in practice.

His work spans the infrastructure that decides what an agent is allowed to do, making agents prove who they are or who they are acting for, putting a human in the loop when the stakes are high, and the traceability to reconstruct exactly what happened and why. He designed and built Clearance, an authorisation and audit layer that sits between AI agents and the business systems they act on, and Trellis, a platform where AI agents do real engineering work inside containers with tiered access, so they can ship without ever touching production.

Before focusing on AI, Joël spent a decade delivering ServiceNow for NSW Health, PwC, KPMG, Ausgrid and Reece, and ran DXC Technology's portal practice — moving from delivery into practice leadership and then global product, up to Chief Technologist. Much of that time was spent sitting between engineers and executives, translating the technical side into something the business could actually decide on.

Joël embeds AI into the operations of established Australian businesses — spanning agentic systems, voice AI and document intelligence — and advises enterprise clients directly on architecture and risk for business, IT and executive audiences. He works alongside the SOC and GRC specialists who own detection and compliance depth. What he brings is first-hand experience of building and running AI agents in production, and the controls that keep them safe.