Company

Built from inside the work.

We advise on work we have already carried.

seed
sapling
canopy
overstory
01The philosophy

The future is something we cultivate.

Artificial intelligence is expanding what organisations can know, create and do. But access to intelligence will not determine what organisations become.

The conditions around it will.

The strategy leaders set. The organisations they shape. The capability they cultivate. The choices they make about what intelligence is for.

This is the philosophy behind Overstory.

An overstory is the highest layer of a forest canopy. It shapes what gets light, what has room to grow and what can thrive beneath it. Leadership works in much the same way. It creates the conditions in which everything else grows.

We established Overstory after more than two decades leading transformation from inside complex, regulated organisations. That experience taught us that technology will continue to change. The enduring work is building organisations capable of changing with it.

The future isn't something we predict. It's something we cultivate.

02The practitioners

The people you meet are the people you work with.

Senior practitioners, close to the work from beginning to end.

Founder and Managing Director

Orla Glynn

Orla spent over twenty years leading transformation inside banking, energy and telecommunications, the last ten leading major enterprise data and AI transformation. She built the teams, ran the budgets and owned the numbers.

That is what she brings to boards and executive teams. Not a view on where the technology is going. A view on what it takes to get an organisation there, from someone who has done it at scale and lived with the result. She works directly with the hyperscalers and the frontier labs, so clients get an honest reading of which vendor claims hold.

Credentials
  • Non-Executive Director, Treasury Corporation of Victoria
  • Advisory board, i14, an Australian frontier AI company
  • Top 10 Women in AI in APAC
  • Australia's Top 100 Innovators
  • Winner, Women in AI in Infrastructure, 2023
Connect on LinkedIn
Technical Director

Jeffrey Aven

Jeff Aven is Technical Director at The Overstory Group. A data and AI consultant with more than thirty years of industry experience, he has held senior technical roles on major technology transformation projects and is the author of several published books on data and analytics.

He has spent more than a decade as a technical trainer, delivering courses for Google, Databricks, Confluent and others, and currently teaches courses on generative AI and agent building.

Jeff is also the founder of StackQL Studios, a member of the AAIF (Agentic AI Foundation).

Credentials
  • Author of several books on data and analytics
  • Certified instructor for Databricks and Confluent
  • Founder of several successful software/data startups
Connect on LinkedIn
03The record

The work behind the advice.

Twenty years inside complex, regulated organisations, carrying the outcome rather than recommending it.

3

Industries transformed: banking, energy and telecommunications.

20+

Years leading transformation in complex, regulated organisations.

Top 100

Recognised among The Australian's leading innovators.

1,000s

Leaders and teams equipped to work with AI.

04Proof

Where we practised our craft, and who we work with now.