Your AI clone could outlive your job as Aussie mathematician behind explosive start-up reveals how ‘digital twins’ workClones of workers are coming and they could live on after you quit or get sacked, a Melbourne mathematician behind a major player in the space says.Ben Graham@bengrahamjourno5 min readAugust 31, 2026 - 11:48AMA digital clone of your working self could live on forever after you quit or get sacked, according to a Melbourne-educated mathematician who is shaking things up in Silicon Valley with a major new start-up.Doctor Jonathan Budd is one of the co-founders of Silicon Valley start-up Twin1. The company has made waves in the world’s tech capital since launching last year and this week received $20 million in funding to build what it calls “digital twins” for workers.The 45-year-old spent parts of his childhood in Thailand and Hungary before moving to Melbourne at 18. He studied mathematics and political science at the University of Melbourne, eventually returning to complete a PhD before moving overseas.Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he told news.com.au the biggest change AI brings may not be about replacing humans, but changing the fundamental nature of what humans are paid to do.Twin1 creates ‘digital twins’ of workers.It sounds like a concept from a sci-fi film, but the concept of Twin1 is surprisingly simple.“We basically create a version of you that lives inside Slack, Teams, or a web interface,” he told news.com.au. “The initial application gives it access to your email and relevant workplace information, allowing you to interact with it and automate routine tasks.”Others you may likenewsnewsThe next step is the ability to interact with other people’s twins within an organisation. “Processes don’t exist in isolation, and work relies on input from others,” he said. “The twin connects those sources of information and people to augment your work and reduce the time it takes to deliver value. It’s designed specifically for knowledge workers, such as those in law or finance, where knowledge is at the core of the job.”How digital twins work in the real world He gave a real-life example of how Twin1 works in a team working for a bank.“We’re working with a bank at the moment where one of the use cases is automating responses to queries sent to a fraud investigations inbox,” Dr Budd said. “There’s a team of about 15 investigators, and typically, just one person is on duty trying to figure out how to respond to incoming cases.“With the twins in place, we can ping the network across the whole team to source knowledge. The system asks the question, gathers their insights, synthesises the findings, and produces an answer grounded in primary sources and documents. “Instead of having to track down a colleague to ask how they handled a similar case in the past, the technology automates and speeds up that entire process.”Doctor Jonathan Budd is one of the co-founders of Twin1.While workers can still email colleagues directly, pinging a team member’s digital twin allows staff to bypass traditional response delays and accelerate the flow of internal communication.“Knowledge within an organisation is distributed, but it’s also siloed and protected by access and security permissions,” he said. “Information silos exist for very, very good reasons, so we absolutely respect existing privacy and security structures.“If you know exactly who you want to talk to, you can ping their twin — though you always have the option of emailing them directly. The whole idea is to speed up the flow of information.He said the limits to what a twin can say and do exist for very good reasons.“We absolutely respect existing security frameworks,” he said. “We built a layer of controls allowing customisation over what topics a twin will answer and who it speaks with, maintaining human oversight so information never breaches organisational boundaries.”Dr Budd said there are safeguards in place so your digital twin will not tell your colleagues about your salary or a dispute you’ve had with your boss, as Twin1 incorporates a security layer managed by system administrators who set baseline security rules across the business.“We allow a lot of customisation around what topics your twin will or won’t answer, and who it will speak to — alongside human-in-the-loop oversight so information doesn’t spread beyond set boundaries,” he said. “Usually, an organisation administrator has oversight over this and sets sensible defaults, though they can delegate certain choices to the user. But even within our own company, we set strict baseline defaults like never answering questions about sensitive matters like HR, salary, or compensation.”The elephant in the roomWhile boosting the output of teams through digital twins sounds exciting for businesses, the elephant in the room, as with all AI, is how this affects your employment prospects once organisations are effectively able to clone you.When asked if the technology will allow companies to downsize and do more with fewer staff, Dr Budd said the primary goal is augmentation rather than head-count reduction.“You could interpret it as doing more work with less staff, but that’s not what we’ve seen. We see it as an augmentation. In my own experience using AI tools, it hasn’t replaced my ability; if anything, I just get higher throughput,” he said.“The goal isn’t to replace people, but to help them learn how to use these tools to increase their output. It fundamentally changes the nature of work. Personally, I spend less time generating code and more time focusing on problem-solving, gathering context, and creating detailed design documents to then hand over to the AI to execute.“I think what’s interesting is it shifts the focus away from the process and more towards the value of what the outcome of this process is and how do we how do we sort of achieve that outcome at a higher quality.”Dr Budd said Twin1 was about improving the quality of work rather than replacing workers.Perhaps one of the most concerning questions for workers who have been digitally cloned is what happens to the ‘twin’ once you leave or get sacked.After all, what is the need for humans once all their knowledge and expertise has been replicated?Dr Budd said what happens when you leave a job relates to individual company policy. “Given the amount of data retained anyway, it is certainly possible that your twin could live on after you depart,” he said. “For us, the fascinating question is how this technology impacts concepts of ownership and intellectual property — how value gets shared fairly between employer and employee, and how a twin might travel with a worker.“Of course, there are elements of a human worker that we simply cannot replicate. A twin is trained on digital artefacts of information — emails, documents, calendar entries — but tacit knowledge will always remain with the human.“As adoption grows, questioning the ethical boundaries of AI is critical. Whenever our platform generates an answer, it cites the underlying sources, but human accountability remains essential. It is on the individual worker to review what their twin outputs, verify that it is truthful, and refine it before passing it along.”Twin1 takes off, scores $20 million in fundingNew Zealand-born Dr Budd, who moved to Australia aged 18, has seen interest in Twin1 explode in interest in recent weeks.The company was founded in 2025 by Lewis Liu, Tom Cahn, Huiting Liu and Dr Budd and also runs a team in London.More Coverage‘Bullying tactic’ blows up in Trump’s faceJamie Seidel$4bn cash boost for millions of AussiesBlair JacksonThere is a buzz around Silicon Valley this week about the project after it secured a massive $20 million cash injection from sophisticated investors.Aussie Venture Capital fund Tin Alley has joined some big international players on the cap table for the Silicon Valley project.The firm says the funding will be used to expand its teams in London and San Mateo, California, along with enhancing its technology to attract new customers.Read related topics:MelbourneJoin the conversationAdd your comment to this storyTo join the conversation, please log in. 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