Macquarie Uni's AI chief heads to La Trobe

La Trobe University has poached Macquarie University’s head of artificial intelligence Phil Laufenberg, appointing him to a pro vice-chancellorship position focused on the technology.

Phil Laufenberg, La Trobe University’s inaugural Pro Vice-Chancellor (Artificial Intelligence) and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer.

Laufenberg will join La Trobe from early April, taking on dual titles of pro vice-chancellor artificial intelligence and chief artificial intelligence officer, reflecting twin responsibilities overseeing both its strategy and technical deployment.

While it’s not unheard of for technology leaders to be given prestigious pro vice-chancellorships, La Trobe said that Laufenberg’s appointment with a mandate to focus solely on AI is a first of its kind in Australia’s university sector.

Laufenberg will have a busy schedule in the new role.

La Trobe has set itself a goal to become an “AI-first” university and vice-chancellor Professor Theo Farrell said Laufenberg’s appointment is the start of a new phase in the transformation.

It’s given itself until the end of the year to provide all its staff and students access to advanced AI tools.

“Over the past two years, we have upskilled staff, built a vibrant community of practice, piloted high-impact use cases, and tested secure agentic AI systems,” Farrell said.

“[Laufenberg’s] appointment ensures we have the leadership capability to translate our AI ambition into sustained institutional impact for our students, staff and communities."

Laufenberg, meanwhile, said: “This is a once‑in‑a‑generation opportunity for universities to rethink how they operate and how they create value."

"La Trobe is well positioned to lead that change and I’m honoured to be part of that journey."

Laufenberg will be working with senior academics and professionals across La Trobe managing its responsible AI adoption practices. This will include scaling "proven solutions" and embedding AI into La Trobe's core platforms.

His remit includes a strong focus on strengthening La Trobe's data and security posture.

Laufenberg joins La Trobe fresh from overseeing the in-house development and deployment of Macquarie’s open source-based generative AI assistant for the university’s 3500 staff members, ChatMQ.

In an interview with iTnews, Laufenberg said that ChatMQ was built on LiteLLM and Open WebUI, a model and cloud-agnostic platform for self-hosting AI.

He said that that Macquarie University took an unusual approach to ChatMQ, involving users in its development process much earlier than usual and bringing them onboard in stages

It also designed the application’s architecture with an AI gateway that can accommodate multiple large language models (LLM) and, if needed, incorporate custom ones for special projects.

Currently, Macquarie’s staff can choose from OpenAI’s ChatGPT models, which are hosted in Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry cloud, and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet varieties which are hosted in AWS Bedrock.

Laufenberg said that that Macquarie University planned to add Google’s Gemini to the mix.

“We can connect to multiple vendors. We’re very clear on that, because we don't know what the next great model looks like and we want to make it available.

“We're also planning to connect to Google next so that we can also provide access to all the Gemini models and the structure that we've built now is preparing us for that through the AI gateway.

“We can make them available in ChatMQ as they become available in Australia,” Laufenberg said.

Laufenberg has been at Macquarie University, which is based in Sydney’s north-west for less than two years, according to his LinkedIn page.

Before becoming Macquarie’s artificial intelligence head, Laufenberg was course director for Puddle Pod, an AI education start-up that began as side hustle for its previous owner, Michael Batko, who sold it to Founder Foundry early last year for an undisclosed sum after four years.

Laufenberg also had short stint as product and AI director with Web3 training company, Makerversity.com.

His longest tenure was eight years with virtual learning company, Practera, where he rose to the position of chief product officer and had some early exposure to machine learning experimentation in education settings.

Whilst at Puddle Pod Laufenberg taught generative AI, listing under his job description for the role ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini as being among the LLMs he’d had exposure to.

It’s understood that Laufenberg will be able to take up his new role from Sydney without needing to relocate to Melbourne.