Finlay Ekins
Mechatronics engineer who left robots for AI. Builds the systems, and says plainly what does not work.
Finlay Ekins is the co-founder of Hourglass AI, where he leads the technical side of the build: the agents, the integrations, and the engineering judgement about what will hold up in production. He studied mechatronics engineering in Melbourne and worked in robotics before leaving to work on AI full time, and that systems training is how he approaches business workflows: inputs, outputs, feedback loops, and failure modes rather than a process diagram. He writes about the gap between AI demos and AI that survives contact with real work, and his standing advice to clients is to try ChatGPT properly for a month before commissioning anything custom.
Track record
Companies, writing, and press. Newest first, every claim linked to its source.
- 2026Writing
Why most AI projects fail before they start
On the scoping failures that decide an AI project's outcome long before anything is built.
- 2026Writing
The right balance of AI
Where automation earns its place in a workflow and where a person still belongs.
- 2026Writing
Please don't take my brain
On what a business gives up when it outsources its own thinking to a model.
- 2026Press
Former Startmate boss Michael Batko is back in founder mode with Hourglass AI · Startup Daily
Coverage of the Hourglass launch he co-founded.
- 2025 - presentCompany
Hourglass AI · Co-founder
AI implementation agency making Australian businesses AI-native. Leads the technical delivery: agent builds, integrations into the systems of record, and the engineering standards the work is held to.
- 2023 - 2025Company
Independent practice · Independent AI consultant
Two years helping businesses adopt AI before Hourglass, starting with brick-and-mortar operators and moving to startups. The period where the engineering met the commercial reality of what clients will actually use.
- before 2023Company
Robotics engineering, Melbourne · Mechatronics engineering
Studied mechatronics and worked in robotic engineering through university. Left when it became clear the intelligence, not the hardware, was the interesting part.
Written by Finlay
36 pages on this site carry this byline.
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- AI agent frameworks
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- What an AI recruiting agent actually does (screen by screen)
- What is an AI knowledge layer? (And why it is not a data warehouse)
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