Commonly referred to as “the front page of the internet” – Reddit will officially open a Sydney office on Monday.
The multibillion-dollar company’s first presence on the land down under and just its third outside the United States — is a bid to grow its Australian audience and challenge Facebook and Twitter.
The local arm of the world’s most famous bulletin board will be lead by a former executive of Woolworths, Twitter, and Amazon, David Ray.
Reddit chief operating officer Jen Wong says the company chose Australia as its latest target after the local audience grew by more than 40 percent over the past year to become the network’s fourth-largest worldwide.
Reddit has been expanding its user presence in Australia
Currently, the social media platform currently has more than 52 million daily active users on its platform, including an Australian community of more than 700,000.
Reddit users share videos, photos, text, and web links that can be up or downvoted by fellow users on more than 100,000 channels known as subreddits.
The website’s popularity and content attract has attracted controversy in recent years, however; becoming a target for criticism earlier this year when a GameStop short squeeze was organised in one subreddit.
Reddit is the latest in a long line of US tech giants to establish a presence in Australia
Google and Facebook opened Australian offices in 2009, and Twitter established its Sydney headquarters in 2016.
Reddit now plans to compete with Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat for Australian advertisers, but the company says they reach a different market entirely.
As businesses embrace cutting-edge tech, challenges like data sovereignty and AI are taking centre stage.
Over the past six months, the AI industry has seen significant advancements, with competing models such as Meta’s Luma and Google’s Gemini entering the market.
However, these developments come with a reality check. Building large language models (LLMs) requires substantial computing power and time, making immediate returns on investment unlikely.
One promising innovation is agentic AI, a step beyond generative AI, which enables proactive, automated solutions.
For instance, this technology could stabilise IT systems autonomously, diagnosing and resolving issues without human intervention.
Data sovereignty has also emerged as a key focus, with increasing emphasis on keeping data within national borders to comply with local laws. This has driven the adoption of sovereign clouds and private data centres, ensuring secure and localised data processing for AI development.
Deepak Ajmani, Vice President of ANZ & APAC Emerging Markets at Confluent, joins to discuss the evolving business landscape.
Key lessons and tips for seamless Copilot adoption
In this episode, Kate Faarland, the Senior Vice President of Data and AI Programs at AvePoint, discusses the importance of AvePoint’s data and AI program, internal challenges with implementing CoPilot, and the organisation’s learnings from rolling out CoPilot for their workforce.