Vanya Smythe

Engineer first. AI second.

I started in electronics at Television New Zealand in 1987 and moved into DC power supplies and UPS systems in 1992. From 2012 to 2016 I was ABB's sole global DC and AC UPS specialist, responsible for standby power across a project scope above US$500 million a year, and I wrote the battery and UPS courses that went to 42 ABB business units. Since then I have set up a hybrid power business unit for Powerbox Australia and consulted on UNEP-funded Stockholm Convention work in the Cook Islands and Kiribati. In 2024 I built two AI platforms that still run in production: this site, and ebatt.ai, which puts the sizing and standards checks I have used since 1992 in the client's own hands.

Why the record matters to your plan

The four steps on the Approach page need one person who knows how a supplier makes money, how to change the way its people work without losing them, and enough technology to build the result. Split across three specialists, the plan leaks at every handover. The record below is arranged against those three, so you can check the fit.

How the business makes money

Company director since 1996, when at 29 I set up Innovative Energies Australia as director and part-owner. The business came first. The systems to run it followed, in-house Lotus Notes and Domino servers, an ERP system that year and VPN access from 1998, so that distributors and field staff served themselves instead of ringing the office. At Magellan Powertronics I doubled the company's highest annual sales in 2011/12 and won and kept period contracts with Transgrid, Essential Energy, Energy Australia and Ausgrid, the network companies a five-year plan in this trade is written for.

Changing how people work

A new tool fails the day staff decide it has come for their jobs. I hold a bachelor's degree in education and a Certificate IV in workplace training, and I have used both: courses for 42 ABB business units, a four-engineer hybrid-power unit coached from tender to commissioning, lithium-battery training for Essential Energy, and charger training for 30 AirServices Australia field engineers. A trainer works himself out of the critical path; so does what I build.

Technology, the minor part

Internet infrastructure since 1995, ERP since 1996, and since 2024 AI that runs in production: ebatt.ai, retrieval over private documents, agent pipelines, ERP integrations. I know where the data their AI cannot reach comes from: I selected the chargers and battery monitors that produce it, and the DNP3 and Modbus links that carry it, for GLNG's 300 DC systems and APLNG's 192 lithium systems in cabinets above 65 °C. The code follows the plan.

I also hold a bachelor's degree in education and philosophy, specialising in ethics, and have published peer-reviewed research on codes of ethics, ethics training and whistleblowing. A person signing off each decision is not an afterthought in what I build; it is the discipline I trained in before AI existed.