Dr Samantha Pillay OAM: Keynote Speaker

Surgeon. AI Filmmaker. Advocate.

Dr Samantha Pillay was the first woman to train as a urological surgeon in South Australia. Since 2002 she has run a specialist continence practice, treating conditions people would rather not talk about and working to get them talked about. When she needed a short awareness video for World Continence Week, with no budget and no crew, she taught herself to make it with AI. Her films have since won awards in Paris, New York, London and California, and AIFilm4Good, the studio she founded, is the first AI film studio for social impact in the world.

Popular Keynote Topics

Signature Keynote: AI for Good: The Power of Story in the Age of Intelligent Machines

For a hundred years, film belonged to whoever could afford a studio. In 2024 that changed. Dr Pillay made her first AI video for World Continence Week not knowing what a timeline was. Her first documentary, An Incontinent Truth, was submitted to the AI Film Festival in Dubai the night she finished it, became one of five nominees for best AI film, and the following year won Best AI Documentary in Paris. After that the causes chose themselves: prostate cancer, falls, unconscious bias, and the moments at home that could turn violent and don't. Pause shows seven of those moments. It has fourteen speaking roles, and took six days, one desk and about two hundred dollars. Along the way, she built a free medical lecture series delivered by her own AI avatar, which can speak 175 languages, a free schools STEM programme, and a free bladder diary app, having never written a line of code. She sits on advisory committees on AI guardrails, and her argument is plain: while the guardrails are argued over, the people with the most to gain must not be the last to get access. Everyone has a cause, and a story nobody else can tell. The how is no longer the barrier.that

The Goals Nobody Saw

Films, books, a film studio, international awards. Those are the goals people see, the ones that go on a CV. This talk is about the other kind. Dr Pillay was born with hip dysplasia that went undiagnosed until she failed to walk, and started school in a wheelchair. For the next forty-eight years the goals that ran her life were ones nobody counted: get up the stairs at school, get off the floor without holding on to something, get through surgical training while going to the gym twice a day just to function. She tells the story of the hip replacement she put off for years, of learning afterwards to lift her own leg off the bed, and of the patient in her eighties who, without knowing it, set her the next goal. Written for people who lead, it is a talk about the goals you set just so that you can keep going.

Patients are asking AI first

Dr Pillay's patients arrive having put their symptoms to a chatbot before they put them to her. She is not against it, and could not stop it if she were. Hundreds of millions of health questions a week now go to a machine first. This talk is what a doctor sees when that happens. AI does not take a history: it might suggest an anti-inflammatory for back pain without ever asking about the blood thinner. A drug company cannot fly a surgeon to a resort to change what she prescribes, yet an algorithm can steer millions of health decisions at once with no register and no regulator looking inside. A surgeon is responsible for the operation, and the instrument maker if the instrument breaks, but an AI scribe can be sold on terms that put every error on the doctor. Medicine already has rules for anything that can harm a patient. The patient gives consent. The tool is tested before it is used. Someone is responsible when it fails. A regulator can look inside. She asks why AI is the exception, and what it would take for it not to be. We are short of clinicians, not of patients, and the same tools, governed properly, can train and support more of them. Whatever a patient reaches for first should be there for the patient, not for the company that sells it.

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Dr Pillay holds the Medal of the Order of Australia and is the winner of the 2026 AMA Women's Health Award. She was the South Australian winner and national finalist of the 2025 Telstra Best of Business Awards, Accelerating Women, a 2022 South Australian finalist for Australian of the Year, and a 2026 finalist in the Australian Financial Review AI Awards. She speaks to health, corporate and education audiences, in person and online.