Last Friday, Symphonics AI won AI Innovator for Media and Communication Services at the 2026 Australian AI Awards. We were one of six finalists in our category, judged by an independent panel of AI experts. We started trading in February, so the award arrived nine months into the life of the business, an extraordinary feat.
The Australian AI Awards are run by AI Daily, part of Momentum Media, and cover 37 categories across the economy. When the winners list came through, I read it more times than I'd like to admit. Telstra won Best Application of Responsible AI. Origin Energy won for utilities and Santos won for the energy sector. People from EY and CSIRO were recognised for their work on the same night.
These are organisations with thousands of staff and decades of history behind them. A few lines further down that same list is the company Alex Littlejohn and I started this year. It's an absolute honour, and I don't say that lightly.
In the same league, for one night
For one night, what we're building was recognised in the same league as some of the most respected names in the country. I keep coming back to that, because it says something about where AI is taking our industry. A small team with a clear idea can now build technology that stands next to the work of Australia's largest companies. Not long ago, that would have needed far more people and far more capital.
I've spent 19 years in this industry, at PwC, Dentsu and TikTok. For most of that time I either worked inside big companies or competed against them. You learn a lot in those rooms about how decisions get made and how hard they are to change. What I never pictured was something I built sitting alongside those businesses on a national honours list.
Building a company is mostly work nobody sees. You back your own judgement long before anyone else has a reason to, and you spend a long time wondering whether the outside world will agree. Then a panel with no stake in you looks at what you've made and says yes. That landed harder than I expected.
The idea behind Syntria
Syntria is built around a question: How can we apply AI models to make better audience intelligence and media curation decisions for our industry?
Over the past decade, advertising got very good at automating how money is spent. The decisions about where it should go stayed slow and manual, or they were handed to a single system with its own blind spots. That second problem is growing fast. More businesses now run their thinking through one AI model without asking what that model can't see. Every model has gaps in what it knows and leanings in how it reasons. When one model shapes a media plan, those gaps flow straight into where a client's money goes.
Our answer is that no single model gets to decide. In Syntria, six AI models have to reach agreement before any recommendation reaches a client's media plan. It's a harder way to build and it takes far more testing. There were plenty of days when a shortcut would have been easier to ship. We held the line because we believe consensus is how you take bias and blind spots out of a plan before a dollar is spent.
Having an independent panel judge that approach the best in our category tells me the thinking behind Syntria holds up on a national stage. That recognition means more to me than the trophy.
What this means for us
This is a big deal for Symphonics AI, and for me personally it's bigger. We're a small agile team and last week our work stood beside Australia's biggest names. Everyone here can walk into their next pitch with more confidence than they had a week ago.
It matters to the market as well. When an agency or brand weighs us against companies with bigger names and longer track records, they need a reason to trust a business they haven't worked with before. Until now, most of that trust had to come from us. This award gives them a reason that comes from someone else, and for a first-year business that kind of validation is rare.
The people who made it happen
Alex Littlejohn and I have built businesses together for 15 years, including Adconion. This sits near the top of everything we've done. Alex has carried the commercial side of Symphonics while I built the platform, and neither half works without the other.
To our team, this award belongs to you. You took a platform and turned it into results for real clients, one brief at a time, across four locations and several time zones. To the agencies and brands who backed us early, thank you for trusting a first-year business with your budgets and for believing in what we're building.
What comes next
A national award in our first year raises the bar for everything we build next. In 2027 we're growing the team and taking Syntria into new channels and markets, and we'll hold that work to the standard this award has set. I'm proud of what this team has done, and I'm looking forward to showing you what comes next.
https://www.australianaiawards.com.au/winners/2026-winners-and-finalists