Clive Mayhew

Clive Mayhew: fast facts

• Technology entrepreneur, investor and author with more than 30 years of experience.
• Former leader of Netscape’s Australasian business; international experience with CDNOW and other internet businesses.
• Investor and former Chair of Sky Software, acquired by Tribal Group in 2014.
• Early investor and former Chair of OpenLearning; its 2019 listing material reported 2.5 million enrolments from 1.72 million learners.
• Former Chair of Fishburners, serving a three-year term.
• Co-founder and CEO of GOLF.AI.
• Author of Vertical AI: Changing the Game, forthcoming from Dean Publishing, with practical FDE Playbooks across all 12 chapters.
• Retired early at 42 to play golf, study wellness to then instinctively return to the technology industry as an investor and founder

From the early web to the AI opportunity

When Clive Mayhew helped businesses make sense of the early internet, putting information online was only the beginning. The harder question was how the web would change the way they reached customers and sold to them.

He hears a familiar conversation around AI today. Leaders recognise the technology shift, but many start by choosing software. Mayhew wants them to look closely at the work it is supposed to improve. “The leadership question is what becomes possible in the business that was difficult or uneconomic before,” he says.

At Netscape, he led the Australasian business during the commercial internet’s early years. At ecommerce pioneer CDNOW, he moved to the United States to help expand internationally as consumers began buying online.

A different view of the working day

Mayhew stepped away from full-time work at 42, played golf, travelled and studied wellness. The opportunity to stop did not remove his instinct to build. It did sharpen his interest in what technology gives people back.

“In a golf club, that might be the time to welcome a member properly or help a visitor enjoy their day,” he says. “The business benefit matters, but so does the quality of the working day and the customer experience.”

Returning to business, he became an investor and Chair of Sky Software, the Geelong-based cloud student-management company acquired by Tribal Group in 2014. He recalls investing when it had five employees and seeing it grow to around 150 by the sale.

He was also an early investor and former Chair of OpenLearning. Its December 2019 ASX debut letter credited his support and reported more than 2.5 million enrolments from 1.72 million learners. He applies the same adoption questions to AI: do customers get a useful result, return and need less support over time?

His three years as Chair of Fishburners reinforced the commercial discipline: founders needed to know who would use a product, how they would find it and why they would pay. AI makes an early version easier to build, he says, but continued use still has to be earned.

Golf brings the opportunity into focus

Investing in organic juice business Orchard Street exposed the demands of physical operations, from stock and staffing to handovers. In his account, the venture cost him about A$1 million. It reinforced a lesson he brings to AI: a business needs a reliable way to deliver its promise every day.

Through Play Today, he explored digital scoring and golfer engagement before shifting towards AI. Work on a golf rules assistant led to a larger question: could AI also help with the operational work around a round?

At GOLF.AI, where he is co-founder and CEO, the phone concierge can help golfers find and book tee times through supported integrations. The broader ambition is to connect requests across a club’s departments, with each capability introduced as the necessary access and reliability are established.

How to get more out of AI

Mayhew calls the everyday gap between a customer’s simple request and the effort needed to fulfil it the ‘Pro Shop Moment’. It might be a ringing phone at a golf club or a client enquiry that travels between three inboxes. Good employees often make these processes appear smoother than they are.

Rather than waiting for complete certainty before acting in the AI era, his advice is to observe one of those entry points for 90 minutes. Watch without directing the team. Follow a request and record the repeated questions, handoffs and checks needed to finish it. “This gives businesses enough evidence to act while the technology continues to change,” says Clive.

“A faster email can make an employee more productive while leaving the customer stuck in exactly the same process,” he says. “There are so many efficiencies CEOs can replicate from the internet era, but there are also things they can do differently.”

That could be the way they hand the integration of AI to IT. “Technical teams can implement systems but leaders still need to decide how customers should be served and who owns the result,” says Clive.

An AI assistant can answer an enquiry while staff continue checking several systems and chasing the booking behind it is another way businesses can update an existing process with modern technology.

“The internet changed customer access and distribution. AI is now changing how a business can receive a request and carry out the work behind it,” Clive says.

That thinking forms the foundation of his forthcoming book, Vertical AI: Changing the Game, from Dean Publishing. Every chapter includes an FDE Playbook, applying the field perspective of a Forward Deployed Engineer: understand the operation, work through its dependencies and test a better workflow alongside the people responsible for it.

The book also examines memory, trust and the division of responsibility between people and AI. Mayhew’s position is that automation needs explicit limits, a way to recognise exceptions and someone accountable for the result. Faster email writing is useful, but he wants leaders to measure what happens to the whole customer request.

“I expect 2027 to bring more pressure to show operational results from AI,” he says. For him, the ultimate practical test is whether a customer gets the outcome they wanted – “If the team spends less time repairing the process, and the customers’ needs are met, businesses will know they’ve used AI the way it’s meant to be used,” he concludes.

Media enquiries

For interviews, speaking enquiries or more information about Vertical AI: Changing the Game, email Kristy@clive.ai.

Read Clive’s biography or work with Clive.