Lee Hickin leads the Australian National AI Centre (NAIC), with a mission to enable and support Australian industry and society as it adopts and accelerates through AI technology and services. 

Lee has over 30 years’ experience in the technology industry in technical, sales and business development roles. Before joining the federal government, Lee was the CTO for Microsoft ANZ and led the Asia region for Microsoft’s global Responsible AI team. 

Lee has worked across the UK, Asia and Australia. In addition to his time at Microsoft, Lee led the Internet of Things team for Amazon Web Services in Asia Pacific. He was also a CISSP security architect with RSA Security and worked at Tivoli and IBM as a software engineer. 

During his time in industry, Lee has supported governments around the world as an independent contributor. This includes having been a member of the Singapore AI-Verify Board and a founding member of the NSW AI Assurance Committee.

Lee has a Bachelor of Science (Honors) in Business and Information Technology from Bournemouth University.