Professor Michael J. Richardson
Professor, School of Psychological Sciences – Performance and Expertise Research Centre
Frontier AI Research Centre – Lifespan Health and Wellbeing Research Centre
Macquarie University – Sydney – Australia
Title: Process, Not Product: Agentic AI for Multimodal Research, Learning, and Teaming
Abstract: Large language, vision, and speech models are increasingly capable of producing polished outputs — analyses, summaries, code, explanations. Yet in both science and education, the value has always lain less in the product than in the process: the perceiving, questioning, coordinating, and revising through which understanding actually forms. Agentic AI, designed well, can support that process rather than short-circuit it. Here I will outline current work on multimodal and agentic systems spanning conversational and embodied agents, automated analysis and visualisation of high-dimensional behavioural data, AI-supported research and teaching workflows, and human–autonomy teaming in high-tempo command and control settings. Across these domains a common theme emerges: the most effective systems are built around human perceptual, communicative, and coordinative dynamics rather than model capability alone. I will discuss what this process-centred, human-grounded framing means in practice, where these tools genuinely accelerate discovery and learning.