About
Dr Darryl Carlton
Dr Darryl Carlton advises leaders and legal teams on complex IT and AI projects. His career in technology spans five decades, and his work now concentrates on four things: how large IT and AI programmes are delivered and governed, what the evidence shows when they fail, how AI should be governed in practice, and how IT and AI contracts should be written so that delivery can be measured.
Research and qualifications
- PhD on the causes of failure in large-scale IT projects. His doctoral research examined a very large public-sector IT programme in depth, through 181 interviews and about 5,000 pages of project records, and developed the theory of situational incompetence. The published papers appeared in The Journal of Modern Project Management (2017 and 2019), with Swinburne University of Technology as the affiliation on the later paper.
- Current research, RMIT University School of Law (2024 to 2026). Following on from that doctorate, he is researching the consequences of project failure: how accountability for failure is apportioned, how courts weigh causation, and the role of alternative dispute resolution, as described on his public LinkedIn profile. This research is in progress; it is not a completed degree.
Experience
His published author biography describes expertise in the programme management of large and complex IT projects, responsibility for IT budgets exceeding AUD 1.5 billion, a background in artificial intelligence and business process engineering, and strategy and architecture roles in large public and private organisations. He is a co-founder of Vendee Labs (Jersey) Limited, which builds buyer-side infrastructure for agentic commerce, and is based in Jersey, Channel Islands.
Books
Six titles with Technics Publications: AI Governance: Applying AI Policy and Ethics through Principles and Assessments; Garbage In, Gospel Out: The Practitioner's Workbook for Transforming AI Governance; Cybersecurity Governance; Governing AI in Australia: Standards and Regulations; and AI Digest volumes 1 and 2, which synthesise published research from many institutions.
Podcast, newsletter and writing
He hosts AI Governance with Dr Darryl, a podcast on AI governance, project failure and the courts, and writes Bridging the Gap, a LinkedIn newsletter on responsible AI, where his recent series on agent transactions and evidence appeared. His public profile is on LinkedIn.
How he works
- Independence. Findings follow the evidence. In expert work the duty is to the court or tribunal; in advisory work the duty is to the sponsor's decision, not to the programme's reputation.
- Plain language. The job is to make a technical situation understandable to the people who must decide about it, without simplifying it into something untrue.
- Evidence before assurance. Status reports, plans and promises are inputs; records, tests and outcomes are evidence.