Cybersecurity veterans launch new Melbourne consultancy MosaicalAI
Former Tesserent senior partner Mark Jones has launched a new AI consultancy in Melbourne alongside fellow cybersecurity expert Alexandre Medarov, which the pair have dubbed MosaicalAI.
The motivation behind the launch of MosaicalAI is to support organisations in forging ahead with AI while ensuring the appropriate back-stops are still in place, with its services grouped around leadership coaching, design, build, security, and governance.
Together the pair bring over five decades of combined industry experience to their new venture, with Jones most recently working as a director at Thales following its ~$175 million Tesserent acquisition and Medarov leading another AI start-up, dig8italX.
“Move too slow and lose the market; move too fast and risk the business,” goes the company pitch, with Jones stating; “We started MosaicalAI to help Australian businesses move quickly with AI, but without losing visibility, accountability or control. The AI opportunity is huge, but it needs to be done with the right people, workflows, and governance placed around it.”
Prior to his five years between Tesserent and Thales (which just sold off its local managed cloud services business to Interactive), Jones served as deputy CISO at Medibank, before which he was A/NZ cyber risk leader at Kroll and spent time in senior roles at a number of energy and financial services firms including Jemena and ANZ in a career dating back to Deloitte in 1998.
Medarov meanwhile started his career with a stint at Accenturein Germany, and has since 2006 spent time at Dell EMC, both the University of Auckland and Monash, and in a senior cybersecurity role at Allianz back in Munich, where he had led the locally-based AI security consultancy dig8ital and its off-shoot as CISO and managing director since 2017 but most recently out of London.
MosaicalAI
Now the pair have put their expertise and brains together to form MosaicalAI in Melbourne, which takes its name from the ‘mosaic’ of, brace yourselves, an AI operating layer “comprised of the tools, portals, reports, and decision surfaces a customer’s team uses”, including “agents, workflow logic, hand-offs, fallback paths, approvals, and routing and system actions,” among other stuff.
“Our view is that AI needs to be built with the same discipline that cyber has learned the hard way as to visibility, governance, accountability and clear ownership,” Jones says. “There’s a lot of noise around AI right now, but for executives, leaders and teams, I think it comes down to two fears: people are not ready, and businesses do not have the right team to build bespoke AI capability.”
That is where MosaicalAI comes in, the start-up says; “Our work is practical and hands on. We help clients engage their people, build AI into their business, and govern it from day one. We are already working with mid- and upper-middle market firms, and want to help them move at AI speed without creating the technical debt, governance mess, or loss of control that comes from rushing in blindly.”
