# Charlie Holland

> Charlie Holland is a product designer and design engineer building AI products in Australia, now at Omniscient AI, formerly McKinsey and QuantumBlack.

The site at https://charlieholland.com is a client-rendered app. The pages below are static markdown mirrors of its published content.

## About

- [About Charlie Holland](https://charlieholland.com/content/bio.md): Who Charlie is, what he does, and his background.

## Case studies

- [Turning chatter into decisive signal](https://charlieholland.com/content/omniscient.md): Founding designer at Omniscient AI. Reframed the problem and designed the signal model behind the platform that replaced Renault's entire monitoring stack in under eight months, retiring €700k a year in spend.
- [An AI you can leave on watch](https://charlieholland.com/content/sentinels.md): Designed Omniscient's Sentinels monitoring surface: the agent behaviour, a tiered-rigour funnel, and an investigator-plus-vetter loop so an unattended AI earns every interruption.
- [Planning answers in minutes, not months](https://charlieholland.com/content/farm-planning.md): For NSW DPI, turned the worst part of a 6-to-12-month farm development application, working out which rules apply to your land, into something a farmer could do alone in a single sitting. Grounded in 28+ customer interviews; 18 of 20 pilot users rated it highly desirable. Grew into myFarmPlanner, a 2025 planning-award finalist.
- [The cold chain, illuminated](https://charlieholland.com/content/cold-chain.md): Led design for a smart-pallet venture that makes spoilage visible from farm to fork. Surfaced a $50m+ global opportunity, converted five paying pilots in the first twelve months, and co-created self-serve onboarding with fresh produce growers in remote New Zealand.
- [Generative design that creatives can trust](https://charlieholland.com/content/genai-fashion.md): A GenAI tool for one of APAC's longest-running luxury brands that turns market performance into next-season concepts, with every critical call left to the designer.

## Perspectives

- [Where design is heading](https://charlieholland.com/content/where-design-is-heading.md): Design is opening up in both directions, up into business strategy and down into agents, model behaviour and API design. We're in the messy middle, and knowing which problem is worth solving is still what separates good from great.
- [The Decline in Innovation and the Lost Power of Observation](https://charlieholland.com/content/decline-in-innovation.md): Papers and patents have grown steadily less disruptive since 1945. The cause is less a shortage of ideas than the structures we wrap around them, and the way back starts with observation.
- [The traditional portfolio is broken, and here's how I think we should solve it](https://charlieholland.com/content/traditional-portfolio.md): Nobody has time to read a portfolio, so I rebuilt mine as something you can ask. It turned out not to need RAG.
- [Prompting the Prompt](https://charlieholland.com/content/prompting-the-prompt.md): Early ideas on how to make cost, context, and intent visible before you hit send.
- [Operator, Please](https://charlieholland.com/content/operator-please.md): The next wave of AI products will be judged on how well they let people operate, not just automate.
- [Don't blanket your product with AI](https://charlieholland.com/content/dont-blanket.md): Bolting AI onto every surface dilutes the product; apply it only where it earns its place.
- [Growth or Optimisation?](https://charlieholland.com/content/growth-or-optimisation.md): Knowing whether you are chasing growth or optimisation changes which bets are worth making.

## Contact

Site: https://charlieholland.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-holland