# Harrison AI lays off Australian staff amid restructuring and new business model raising concerns

Canonical source: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/iFw1iM1EC2ekPkA6R0SKig
Publication: CamClip
Published: 2026-09-08T03:33:01+00:00
Content role: appearance

## Transcript

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Australians were among hundreds of thousands of passengers who were affected. Harrison AI is an Australian company. It was founded in 2018 by two brothers. And what it does is sell tools that are used to help radiologists interpret scans. They've trained these tools on a number of, we don't know the exact number, but according to government documents, fewer than 30 million patient scans that were obtained from Australia's largest radiology clinic, IMED, without patients' knowledge that was being used to train those. They've since become a very valuable company. They're backed by some of Australia's startup scene's biggest names, and also the Australian government tipped in $32 million at the start of last year in a fundraising round that valued them in the kind of mid hundreds of millions in terms of evaluation. So they are one of the success stories of Australia's startups in the last decade or so. So what do we know about these layoffs now? So the company has laid off some Australian staff. I don't know the exact number. Several of them have posted online, but you know, based on discussions with people inside the company, we know it's you know in the mid-double digits is what's supposed. I've of course tried to speak to the company who hasn't responded to a number of requests of comment, uh, other than picking up the phone and saying that they don't uh answer unsolicited calls. Um but the layoffs were done as part of the company's restructure. They're talking about really doubling down on AI inside the company. Now they sell AI tools, but internally they're talking about going to a kind of model where every employee isn't just you know a worker themselves, but thinks of themselves as a uh a player coach or uh a manager of AI agents to do their work. Um, so they have laid off some staff. Uh, a company executive in an interview uh uh that was posted online, says this move has also led to other staff um leaving as well. And around the same time, the company has also launched an affiliated US company that is going from selling these AI tools to directly hiring doctors to use the school uh the tools in a teleradiology service. Okay, so just take us through some of the questions now that are being raised by this new business model. Yeah, so experts I spoke to raise the idea that combining someone who both sells the tool but also hires doctors to care for patients raises a potential conflict of interest because you know ultimately a doctor is supposed to be fundamentally just care about their patient care. That's you know their number one um guiding principle. But if you are hired by someone who is giving you a certain tool, um, you know, there are questions about, for example, could a doctor choose not to use that tool if they're employed by the company, or even at a more granular level, there's a well-known concept in uh AI ethics and and uh healthcare, particularly, where they talk about automation bias. And that's the idea that if a person is using a tool that helps it make decisions for them, sometimes they might defer to the suggested decisions, you know, the automated decisions, even though their better judgment might suggest otherwise, they might just trust the machine when maybe they shouldn't. And experts said, you know, there is of course like a kind of implication about if the people who hire you make the tool, whether that kind of then places pressure on the people, the doctors using the tool to accept what it says. Now, um, the company again didn't respond directly to me, but has said um, you know, it's this US affiliate is actually an independent company, and that the doctors who it hires are independent and can question that judgment. And I should also say that the company, as well, you know, based on what the um experts who I spoke to said that you know this could be an opportunity for a um for these doctors to use a health uh uh tool that could make them more efficient. So, you know, there are definitely upsides to this as well. And the company says, you know, based on it's got advertising material on its website for the doctors that it's trying to hire, saying that we expect that you'll be 30% more efficient using this tool. Um so there's definitely an upside, but there's questions about how do you use that responsibly and and are those kind of checks and balances to make sure that ultimately you're doing everything you can to ultimately care for the patients. Right, Cam Wilson, thanks very much. Thank you.