Vanya Smythe

Engineer first. AI specialist second.

I started in electronics at Television New Zealand in 1987, moved into power systems engineering through DC power supplies and UPS systems in the early 1990s, and have spent the years since designing standby power for some of the largest infrastructure projects in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East — including LNG facilities, critical airport backup power, and Pacific Island grid stabilisation.

From 2012 to 2016 I was ABB's sole global DC and AC UPS Systems Specialist, responsible for all standby power system design across ABB's worldwide project wins — a scope exceeding US$500M per year. I wrote and delivered training courses on batteries, UPS systems, and power electronics to 42 ABB business units worldwide.

Since then I have consulted on UNEP-funded Stockholm Convention work in the Cook Islands and Kiribati, established a hybrid power business unit for Powerbox Australia, and continued to deepen my battery technology expertise. In 2024 I turned my attention to AI, building two production platforms — this site (ethospower.ai) and ebatt.ai — along with the systems behind them: automated lead nurture pipelines, CRM integration, AI-generated blog publishing with newsletter distribution, a multi-tenant prompt optimisation tool, and an AI solution designer that generates interactive architecture diagrams. These are the same systems I build for clients.

I hold a bachelor's degree in education and philosophy with an ethics specialisation, and have published peer-reviewed research on codes of ethics, ethics training, and whistleblowing. That background shapes how I think about responsible AI deployment.

Business operations, organisational transformation, and technology are usually three different consultants. In my case they're the same person: I've run a business since 1994 — director and part-owner of Innovative Energies Australia, deploying its first ERP system in 1996 and later doubling Magellan Powertronics' highest-ever annual sales. I'm a Cert IV-qualified trainer who wrote and delivered UPS and battery training to 42 ABB business units worldwide — transformation succeeds when the people doing the work are trained and equipped, not when a platform is mandated from the top. And on the technology side, I've been building internet infrastructure since 1995, through two decades of web and ERP systems, to the production AI platform this site runs on today. A published, peer-reviewed researcher in applied ethics underwrites all of it — governance isn't an afterthought bolted onto AI projects, it's the discipline I trained in before AI existed.