Roland Taylor

Technology Engineering Lead, AI and Automation, at Workwear Group (Wesfarmers) in Melbourne.

Experience

2022 to now

Workwear Group (Wesfarmers), Melbourne

Technology Engineering Lead, AI and Automation, from October 2025Technology Lead, September 2024 to October 2025Senior IT Engineer, Identity and End User Computing, June 2022 to September 2024

  • Replaced a $30k-a-month outsourced service desk with Nova, an AI agent that is the IT service desk for about 500 staff. Nova runs for about $600 a month, dev and prod together. CSAT has held at 96% while the number of ratings rose about 400%.
  • Builds and runs the company’s AI agents on the group’s Enterprise Landing Zone on Azure, each with its own landing zone, CI/CD, sign-in and monitoring: Nova, Safety Sam (safety reporting, live to all employees since October 2026) and Sage (HR).
  • Technical lead and decision-maker for the company on an engagement co-funded by the group’s AI Accelerator and Microsoft. It delivered the Enterprise and AI Landing Zones, and IBIS, an excess-inventory agent, is in flight.
  • Built a CRM after discovery with account managers, their managers and executives. About $140 a month, with no per-seat licences.
  • Final escalation point for the engineers in Cyber Security, End User Computing, Cloud and Infrastructure, and AI and Automation.
  • Runs the AI Centre of Excellence and Community of Practice. Ran a leadership workshop where the room briefed an agent and watched it built live. Designed and built Prompt Lab, a prompt-engineering academy where staff pass by prompting a real AI that grades them.
  • Packaged Nova for the group’s AI Accelerator marketplace so other divisions can reuse it. It was the first submission that was a working agent.

2018 to 2022

Origin Energy, Melbourne

Senior IT Engineer, October 2019 to June 2022Project Coordinator (contract), from June 2018

  • Brought in to help merge three Active Directory domains into one for about 8,000 staff across continents.
  • Moved the Citrix estate from on-premises to AWS, then on to Azure Virtual Desktop to support 2,000 staff in Manila. That second move was about 80% done when the pandemic hit.
  • When the pandemic hit, helped get the whole business working remotely, across head office, drilling sites and power plants on operational technology networks.

2016 to 2018

Kinetic IT

Senior Service Desk Technician

  • Started on the phones on the Qantas service desk and made senior within a year. Moved to Melbourne for the Origin Energy account, and was hired away by Origin within a year.

2015 to 2016

Harvey Norman

AV and IT Senior Sales Consultant

  • Regularly hit stretch targets and maxed out the monthly incentives, with repeat customers and referrals by name.

2014

Airbnb

Host Activations

Education

2009

The New Zealand Film and Television School

2020

AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate

Outside work

Runs SOL, a home server of about 65 containers kept as code and deployed through CI. My AI avatar runs on it, alongside an MCP server that gives Claude operational access and a daily security watch.

Australian and New Zealand citizen, free to travel.

An AI that answers questions about Roland. He reads every conversation.