Build, Not Buy: AI Sovereignty, Accountability and the Human Edge with Rohan Samaraweera

On this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey speaks with Rohan Samaraweera, former AI and analytics lead at the Department of Home Affairs. The conversation opens with how AI conversations inside government have shifted since the arrival of ChatGPT. They discuss Hermes: how predictive analytics built for the international mail stream helped identify hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit drugs, and how they calculated the platform's broader social impact at roughly two billion dollars. They discuss why AI's return on investment so often lands on someone else's balance sheet, what Robodebt teaches government about governance and accountability, and whether Australia's new Office of AI can join up that picture across agencies.Rohan makes the case that access to frontier AI is a dependency, not an asset, and explains what genuine sovereign capability requires beyond a licence or a locally built data centre — drawing on his own experience at ASD and Home Affairs reducing reliance on contractors and vendors. He and Miah cover the diffusion of power between states and multinational technology companies, the opportunity for Australia to build small, reliable, high-trust AI systems rather than compete at the frontier, and what the country needs to invest in now to close the gap with allies. The conversation closes with why human expertise remains indispensable to AI deployment, illustrated by a striking anecdote from an international mail centre, and Rohan's take on the "one yes versus one no" problem facing anyone trying to innovate from inside a large institution.Rohan Samaraweera was the enterprise AI and analytics lead at the Department of Home Affairs, and a 16-year veteran of the Australian Signals Directorate. He recently founded Emrest AI and spent a year at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center researching AI and national security.