Fast Five with Douglas Bester
We recently spoke with Douglas Bester, Founder at Sentient Computing ahead of his Keynote address at Iron Ore | Open Pit Operators. His keynote session focuses on disruptive technologies.
Building Digital Resiliency: How Mining Companies Can Adapt and Thrive in this Age of Disruptive Technologies
Can you tell us a little bit about your career and what led you to founding Sentient Computing?
I started my career in technical roles in heavy industry and kept bumping into the same frustrations: the way most organisations are structured made it hard to build genuinely high‑performing teams, wealth and opportunity were unevenly distributed, and for a lot of people, going to work was simply a drag rather than something energising.
Founding Sentient was my response to that. I wanted to prove you could build a serious technology company that wasn’t designed around the usual “scale fast and sell” playbook, but around creating an entity that endures, looks after its people, and shares the benefits more fairly.
Underneath the tech, Sentient is really an experiment in a different kind of organisational design: one where leadership is more distributed, people have real autonomy, and the experience of work is something you can actually look forward to, not just endure.
From your global experience, what practices consistently lead to better business outcomes as technology evolves?
In my experience, the organisations that do best with emerging technology treat it as a collaborative journey, not a procurement exercise. They invest in genuine partnerships with SMEs, focus everyone on clear outcomes rather than over‑specified scope, and give teams enough freedom to experiment their way to the right solutions.
This will be especially important in the AI sift that is coming. We’ll be discussing real‑world examples where collaboration and outcome‑focus worked, and cases where rigid scopes and an “us vs them” mindset actually killed value.
What consistently doesn’t work is locking everything into strict scopes and pushing all the risk onto suppliers, especially in fast‑moving areas like AI. When miners create the conditions for their SME partners to flourish instead of just squeezing them, they get better thinking, more honest feedback, and ultimately better products and services.
What are the most common technology challenges in Iron Ore and Open Pit Operations and how can these be avoided?
Over the next 5–10 years, I believe that the biggest technology challenges for miners won’t be technical, they will be based on work flow, especially in the contractual area. The traditional approach to IP ownership, fixed procurement, and how to build a “200‑person camp” delivery model is built for large, well‑defined projects, not fast‑evolving technologies like AI.
The challenge will be to split the way these areas are approached. If we cant take a different mindset into the AI conversation, we risk getting a lot of activity and very little real value. Overly rigid contracts, tight IP grabs, and treating suppliers as disposable will discourage the kind of deep partnership and experimentation that this will require. The miners who will win are the ones who align their commercial models with the long‑term nature of their assets, creating a space for learning, shared IP and hence shared development costs, and delivery models that let smaller unencumbered 3rd party teams do their best work over time.
Your presentation is centred around resiliency, what are the key lessons you have learnt through your career around resilience.
Many of my lessons about resilience come from deliberately designing Sentient as a long‑term organisation, not a “scale and sell” story. We’ve focused on organisational design, distributed leadership, and ways of working that don’t rely on a single hero, so shocks in one area don’t break the whole system. Above all, we’re trying to build something that benefits our people and community over the long term, because organisations that are genuinely good for their ecosystem tend to be the ones that endure.
Who should see your keynote presentation in June, and why?
This keynote is about how we’ve spent the last 18+ years delivering solutions to organisations, and what is has taught us about what actually works and what doesn’t. It’s for leaders and founders who want practical, real‑world lessons across contracts, culture, organisational design and partnerships.
It will appeal to anyone who wants to discuss a pragmatic and cautiously optimistic outlook on how AI can be leveraged using what we have in WA, our people, the capability and the community so we can build something remarkable for the future here, rather than just buying it in.