Rio Budiman had no security background. He made AI his thinking partner instead.

An NDIS support coordinator's day is made of conversations — with participants, with families, with providers. The record of those conversations is what everything else depends on, and it gets written afterwards, from memory.

Rio Budiman is building the tool that catches them. Nueco takes what a coordinator says about a visit and returns it as a structured note.

"Nueco is an app designed for NDIS supporters… so they'll be able to note take using voice notes through the app," he says. "Through the app they can just kind of tell what they're talking about with their participants, and it will provide the structured notes afterwards."

The site puts the same idea more bluntly: "Every call. Every commitment. Never lost in a notebook again."

Ask Rio what sent him looking at AI and he does not talk about writing code. He talks about the two words that sit over everything in this sector.

"The challenge that I'm currently focused on is how do I make documentations that are compliant and also secure," he says.

That is a hard place to start a software company. The notes are about people receiving disability support. They are read by providers. They have to hold up. Nueco's own site is careful about the difference between mechanics and promises — it describes consent read aloud before a call is recorded, a human sign-off on every note, and corrections added as timestamped addendums rather than silent edits.

Here is the part that should not work. Rio built it himself, and AI is not a helper in that story — it is the whole method.

"I use AI pretty much end to end," he says. "I use AI to research the industry. I use AI to develop the application."

He names the tool he delegates to: "Coder, which is a multi-agentic type of coding platform that allows me to organise and delegate the actual application for them to build." One person at the top, work handed out and coming back.

The line that matters most is not about code at all.

"I can also use AI as my thinking partner to make sure that my thinking is correct," he says — and then, without prompting, the admission underneath it: "I don't have any particular background in cybersecurity side of things."

So the expertise he could not hire is the expertise he asked for. Not to write the security for him, but to help him understand it well enough to make the calls himself.

Rio arrived at the AI Pathfinder program with a working idea and a wide audience. He left with a narrower one.

"It helps me to focus on the ideal customer profiles," he says, "and what are the steps to get it funded as a founder." Elsewhere in the same answer: how to launch, more broadly, as a founder — a set of questions he had not had a reason to ask before.

The other half was the pitch. "Understanding what are the things that you can do to improve your pitching," he says, and "helping you to make sure that you are confident when you're showing your ideas, and making sure that it's clear and it can be understood by any type of audience."

Building alone is the default for someone in Rio's position. The program interrupted it.

"It also provided me an opportunity to talk with other founders as well in the network," he says. "Through their sessions, I'll be able to know other ideas and get input from them as well, and making sure that we can support one another."

Nueco is in early access. Pricing is not settled. Rio's own description of where he is sounds like someone who knows that.

"At the moment it's still evolving, and it will continually evolve," he says. "I can see there is some sort of a direction that I can kind of move forward with."

His next focus is the one he named at the start: "I will use the AI more and understand the actual security around the app," and keep building features from the ground up.