It took missing the shuttle service to San Francisco airport four years ago for Rachel Bui to realise the potential, and power, of technology.
The Cairnlea economist was on a seven-week holiday to the United States when she first encountered Uber, the alternative taxi service.
Anxious not to miss her flight, she was told to download the Uber application onto her phone to order a driver.
In three minutes she was on her way to the airport.
It was fortuitous timing as the San Francisco- based taxi company had just launched in Sydney and Ms Bui had spent the better part of that year (2012) working on deregulation of the taxi industry for the Victorian government’s Department of Treasury and Finance.
“That was the moment I realised this taxi deregulation I was working on was very political … but technology was going to disrupt it,” she said.
After returning home, she started looking more closely at technology and how it could be better harnessed by governments.
“One thing led to another” and before she knew it she was in Sydney helping set up Muru-D, a technology start-up accelerator financed by Telstra.
She spent two years in Sydney before returning to Melbourne late last year to co-found a not-for-profit organisation called the Australia Vietnam Young Leadership Dialogue to foster bilateral relations between the nations’ young leaders.
Ms Bui, who is chief executive of the organisation she describes as a “passion project”, is working with six other volunteers and nine advisers towards their first “dialogue” between 30 young leaders from Australia and Vietnam next year.
The 27-year-old and her mother, who was born in North Vietnam, came to Australia on humanitarian visas in 1994.
Now Ms Bui is working on her new business, Aires, an artificial intelligence (AI) lab that uses AI techniques and data to solve problems using algorithms.
“One of the areas I’m starting at is the publishing space. At the moment publishers have a lot of manuscripts they don’t have time to read. We can develop an algorithm using AI to scan through those manuscripts and figure out if it’s worthy of publishers’ attention.”
And despite the business being in its infancy, she’s in it for the long haul.
“This … will be my life’s work.”
