Hamish Stening

Background

About Hamish Stening

I am an Organisational Psychology PhD candidate specialising in human communication, computational modelling, and conversational AI. My work sits at the intersection of AI, linguistics, and nonlinear dynamical systems modelling, with a focus on how human interaction can be modelled, affected, and/or captured as powerful and useful inputs for AI systems.I have worked across research and industry to design, analyse, and improve intelligent systems. At Google, I helped shape research direction for conversational agents by identifying structural gaps between human–human and human–agent interaction, translating linguistic theory into modelling strategy, and building autonomous dialogue prototypes that improved perceived interactional quality. My work involved large-scale conversational data analysis, evaluation framework design, and experimental prototyping. Alongside this, I operate as an independent data and systems consultant. I have partnered with accounting firms, medical practices, and sporting organisations to transform fragmented datasets into structured decision systems, build automation pipelines, and provide analytics that inform operational and strategic planning. My focus is not only on extracting insight, but on designing robust architectures that scale and reduce organisational friction.Across all roles, I am motivated by the same question: how can we design intelligent systems that are structurally sound, empirically grounded, and aligned with human behaviour? I am particularly interested in technical leadership roles where research depth, systems architecture, and product execution intersect.