Graeme Caplen: City’s digital future in this man’s hands

GRAEME Caplen seems almost suspiciously relaxed.
He’s engaged, present, quick to laugh. He speaks about artificial intelligence, robotics and quantum computing with the same ease that most people reserve for discussing weekend plans. The future, to him, isn’t something frightening or unknowable. It’s simply another problem to solve.
Which is probably just as well.
As the leader of UiLab, the City of Logan’s emerging technology hub, Mr Caplen has been handed the enviable — and daunting — task of helping an entire city prepare for a future arriving faster than most of us are comfortable admitting. Schools. Businesses. Manufacturers. Young people. Teachers. Politicians. Everyone, eventually, will need to understand how technology is reshaping the world.
Mr Caplen doesn’t see his role as teaching people about AI.
He sees it as teaching them how to think.
That distinction explains almost everything.
It also explains why someone whose career has zig-zagged through music festivals, social media, disaster relief, software, venture capital, animal welfare and Australia’s leading scientific research organisation somehow feels perfectly suited to the job.
His story begins much further away.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Caplen arrived in Australia at 19 after his parents decided to search for a better future.
“My parents’ whole goal was to give their kids a good life,” he says. “The move was their roll of the dice.”
His mother worked as a nurse. His father was a courier. There was no family fortune waiting to fund university or launch a start-up.
So Mr Caplen did what would become a recurring theme throughout his life.
He figured it out.
He worked relentlessly to save the $20,000 needed to attend university, eventually walking into the cashier’s office carrying literal rolls of cash.
“I remember paying it over the counter.”
One year later, the money had run out.
Ironically, he had finished second academically in his year.
“It wasn’t giving me what I needed,” he says. “So I’m 20. What do I do? Either I get a job or I create a business.”
It was 2008. Mr Caplen is barely 20.
Most sensible people might have chosen employment.
Caplen instead chose curiosity.
While researching how technology was transforming music, his work caught the attention of QMusic, organisers of Bigsound.
Their brief was marketing.
His thinking was broader.
Rather than promoting a conference, he believed Bigsound should become a festival.
His target audience? Women aged between 18 and 22.
“The boys would follow.”
They did. The event sold out.
During the festival, Mr Caplen’s team live-posted quotes to Twitter, things they heard that they thought might interest others. Today that sounds painfully obvious. In 2008 it bordered on revolutionary.
Almost overnight, he became “the content guy.”
That accidental reputation launched his first agency, Union Lane.
Looking back now, it’s almost charming how ordinary some of the ideas sound.
Suggesting bakeries install Wi-Fi.
Building phone apps.
Helping businesses understand social media.
At the time, these weren’t standard marketing strategies. They were experiments.
“I guess I was learning to pitch.”
They’re pitching skills that would eventually land him in one of the more surreal moments of his career.
By then, Mr Caplen had built Entegy, an event technology platform that quietly became one of Australia’s software success stories.
In his late twenties, he found himself in Silicon Valley pitching the company to Eventbrite.
Everything appeared to be going according to plan until tech royalty senior vice-president Matt Rosenberg tapped him on the shoulder.
“You’ll be presenting to the entire company.”
“In 20 minutes.”
No preparation.
No rehearsal.
No panic.
“I did it,” Caplen says. “And I nailed it.”
Entegy won the deal, becoming Eventbrite’s exclusive provider in a partnership reportedly worth around $1 million annually.
“I guess he (Rosenberg) wanted to see how we worked under pressure.”
Pressure would become a familiar companion.
Mr Caplen often says opportunity hides inside chaos.
His own career repeatedly proves the point.
When the devastating Brisbane floods struck in 2011, while others watched events unfold, Mr Caplen and his team built a simple online page connecting people who needed help with people willing to give it.
Known as FloodAid, the initiative spread virally through Twitter.
Within less than two weeks, it had reached hundreds of thousands of people.
Families found fridges.
Communities located supplies.
Someone even found a puppy.
“I was just young and having fun,” he says. Perhaps.
But “having fun” has often had unusually practical outcomes.
His first tax return totalled around $9,000. Financially, he wasn’t winning.
Relationship by relationship, however, he was building something much bigger.
Over the next decade Entegy expanded internationally, growing to partnerships across 18 countries while giving Mr Caplen something more valuable than commercial success.
Perspective.
“Entegy was the ticket to that world.”
Then life intervened.
In 2018, his best friend died from cancer.
During the same period, Mr Caplen became a father, launched the Happy Paws Happy Hearts Foundation — connecting people living with disability with rescued animals — and soon welcomed a second child.
Suddenly, success looked different.
Ask him what he’s most proud of and it isn’t Silicon Valley.
It’s Happy Paws.
“I love designing something I’m proud of,” he says.
“It’s one of the gifts in life, impacting somebody you don’t know for the better.”
That philosophy became the thread connecting every chapter that followed.
He built software consultancy Embersea, helping founders scale products.
He joined VentureOn, learning venture capital from some of the world’s leading investors.
Then came perhaps the biggest intellectual leap.
At CSIRO, as commercialisation lead for Data61, Mr Caplen immersed himself in artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, remote sensing and quantum computing—not as an academic, but as someone asking a deceptively simple question.
Can this improve people’s lives?
If the answer was yes, how could it leave the laboratory?
It was the perfect role for someone who has always stood between brilliant ideas and practical outcomes.
Yet, even there something was missing.
“Venture capital is a rich man’s game,” he says.
“What I found was that when you’re on the VC side, you’re not on the field.”
Then, in February 2025, another phone call came. UiLab.
“UiLab is a culmination of all things in my past.”
It’s difficult to disagree.
Today, Mr Caplen spends his time helping teachers understand AI rather than fear it. He works with manufacturers exploring automation. He encourages school students to solve problems with technology instead of simply consuming it. He helps businesses discover that AI isn’t replacing human thinking — it rewards better thinking.
UiLab’s programs are designed to build digital confidence across Logan through practical education, industry collaboration and community engagement.
It isn’t about gadgets. It’s about capability.
Perhaps that’s why Mr Caplen never sounds like a stereotypical technology evangelist.
He isn’t dazzled by shiny things.
He’s fascinated by people.
He says his mother often described him as the “problem child” growing up — creative, artistic, slightly rebellious, always inclined to do things differently.
Those qualities, once frustrating for teachers and parents, now seem remarkably useful.
Because the future probably won’t belong to those with all the answers.
It will belong to people comfortable asking better questions.
Mr Caplen’s greatest strength isn’t that he understands artificial intelligence.
It’s that he understands humans.
“We’re like cockroaches,” he says. “We find ways to survive.”
That may be the most reassuring prediction anyone has made about the future.
And coming from the man helping shape Logan’s, it sounds less like optimism than experience.