Keoki Alexander-Chang was working in consulting giant Deloitte’s artificial intelligence laboratory when he decided to throw in his career in pursuit of the greater good.
The 26-year-old entrepreneur from Melbourne watched his mother endure significant challenges while battling to navigate the social services system.
It inspired him to put his high-level AI insights to use, starting with the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Mr Alexander-Change left Deloitte – a “difficult and scary decision” – to launch Minikai at the start of the year, with the goal of “helping every Australian access better care and thrive”.
“Improving access to the NDIS is something that’s very dear to my heart,” he said.
“When you imagine someone trying to navigate that space, there’s a lot of admin and paperwork that goes into setting up a participant’s care plan.
“People with disabilities who have complex needs are allocated a budget and a plan for their care that’s provided by the NDIS but administered and managed by a range of different third-party businesses and organisations.
“And those third parties are essentially providing complex admin services, dealing with a lot of paperwork, whether it’s documenting needs, managing case notes, and so on.
“It’s all unstructured information. What we would be doing is working with those businesses to finetune AI models to process and synthesise that information into something that’s more structured. They can then focus less on manual admin tasks and more on providing services and care.”
NDIA recipients have long spoken about major bureaucratic hurdles to accessing support, with overstretched staff grappling with a major backlog of claims.
In a damning ABC report last month, mental health carer and advocate Mary Hollick described the system as a “catastrophe”.
“It really speaks to the Byzantine maze of the NDIS, which family members are not trained or supported to understand,” Ms Hollick told the broadcaster.
Hitting brick walls while dealing with government social services agencies is something Mr Alexander-Chang has witnessed first-hand.
“Mum has faced some big challenges in her life,” he said. “The complexities of navigating the system meant that she fell through the cracks. When that happens to people, it’s really scary because they feel lost, they lose their voice.
“When the system lets people down, I think they get to a place where they feel uncared for, like nobody can hear them, like nobody cares.
“I saw it with my mum. She virtually spends all of her time co-ordinating different services to get essential supports that she needs. It’s incredibly frustrating and quite overwhelming.
“The people she deals with are good people, they’re there to do good, but they’re just swamped.”
Minikai’s mission is to break down bureaucracy and simplify processes to make the experience simpler and streamlined for both ends of the NDIS.
“We want to focus on a core platform called the Navigator app. So basically, for Australians who struggle navigating social services like the NDIS, the Navigator app would be a platform that provides a more end-to-end AI-assisted workflow for the end-users, so it’s easier for them to access their benefits.
In addition, AI agents specialised in Australia’s social services to carry out more complex tasks on behalf of end users.
“What it’s going to do is help the existing workforce become more productive, because they’re frankly inundated. They’re incapacitated because of how much volume and complexity there is.
“In the first instance, Minikai is helping uplift them to catch up with the volume now, then going forward, the AI agents should be there almost like an, additional member of the team.”
And there’s significant potential to apply the AI models to other parts of the social services ecosystem.
“I think health care, welfare services and disability are very specialised and complex areas. They need all the help they can get, but the general purpose technologies aren’t going to get them as far as they need to be. AI can have a massive impact.”
Those in the venture capital space seem to agree.
Minikai has just secured six-figure pre-seed funding backed by Aussie tech giant Luke Janssen, who founded and led Tigerspike, which he sold to Concentrix in 2017 for $88 million.
“That’s been really good in giving us enough of a runway for a small but stealthy team to bring on our early customers and prove enough value to be able to go onto a seed round.
“The plan is to seek institutional funding this year. We’ve started to warm-up those conversations now.”
Mathematics scholar Dr Tian Sang, who taught Mr Alexander-Chang at Melbourne University, joined Minikai as its chief operations officer.
“I’ve met many students in my thirteen years teaching, but I always remembered Keoki,” Dr Sang said.
“He is a rare talent and when I heard the vision for Minikai, I had to get on board.”