João Fernandes, Head of Innovation and AI at InfoTrack
João Fernandes joined InfoTrack in 2017 as a .NET developer. Nearly a decade, several promotions and one new job title later, he’s now leading the charge as our Head of Innovation and AI.
It’s a role that didn’t exist before this year, and one that João seems almost destined for. It’s also very much a team sport. He works hand in hand with his own team of engineers and innovators, as well as the wider leadership group, to shape where and how AI shows up in the product.
“The need for the role was there,” he says. “AI and innovation are showing up more and more in everyday businesses, so it became necessary. And why me? Because I was already doing it, in practice if not in title. It was the natural next step, and it’s given me the space to focus on that properly, without the day to day pulling me in other directions.”
Nearly a decade in the making
Ask João when the lightbulb moment happened, the one that convinced InfoTrack it needed someone focused on AI full time, and he’ll tell you there wasn’t one. It was a slow build, not a switch flip.
“We started doing this a long time ago,” he explains. “People tend to think of AI as large language models, but long before that there was machine learning, decision trees, even OCR, reading text from images. We’ve been doing it for ages, we just hadn’t named it as such.”
He points back to InfoTrack’s early work automating AP1 forms, extracting information from documents so users didn’t have to type it in themselves. “That wasn’t purely AI to begin with. We were doing it with rules we’d written ourselves. But as we tried to improve it and started looking at models that could parse that information more reliably, that’s when it started to go deeper. From there it was just pedal to the metal.”
Having spent a decade inside InfoTrack’s engineering team, João brings something an external hire couldn’t. “I was part of building most of what we have, and I was leading the teams building it. That gives me a wealth of knowledge, not just about the architecture and the code, but about conveyancing itself, what our clients do and what we can do for them. It puts me in a good place to understand things that others might miss.”
That knowledge feeds into a genuinely collaborative process. João is the one leading the experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, but the direction is shaped together with Scott, Rich and the rest of the leadership team, keeping AI strategy tied tightly to what actually helps clients.
What “document intelligence” actually means
InfoTrack talks about building document intelligence systems that go beyond simple automation, interpreting data and validating cross document integrity. In plain terms?
“Document extraction is just a small piece of it,” João says. “We look at a document, extract the information, and automatically populate the form for the user. That’s a time saver. But we also correlate that information with what’s on other documents, checking if names match across them. If there’s a mismatch, that could delay the transaction, so we flag it early so clients can fix it before it becomes a problem. That’s basically what document review is about.”
AI enabled, not AI first
It’s a distinction that matters, and one João is clear about. InfoTrack describes itself as AI enabled rather than AI first.
“AI enabled is the right term for it,” he says. “We’re producing tools that enable our clients to do their jobs faster, and we’re using AI to do that. I’m not sure AI first is something we want to go to, because that’s not the distinction we have from other products in this space. We have lots of data. We physically send people to councils to gather information. We’ve built scheduling algorithms that solve genuinely hard problems, all IP we created long before AI. AI helps us improve on that, but it isn’t the whole story.”
Trust, guardrails and the steering wheel
Scaling AI in a regulated space like conveyancing brings its own pressure, and João is candid about where the responsibility sits.
“It comes down to using the tools to serve you, rather than trusting the tools to do your job,” he says. “It’s like using a car to go somewhere. You get there faster, but you have to drive it carefully and respect the rules. We don’t present information as final or unable to be validated. The user has to see it, use it as a tool, and not just send it off without looking.”
That’s built into the product itself. “There are little icons we call the source eyes that you can click to verify where information came from and what the document actually says. We don’t provide legal counselling with these tools. We use AI to help reach a final result. It doesn’t produce the final result.”
On the scaremongering around AI in the legal sector, hallucinations, clients running enquiries through ChatGPT, João reaches for a steering wheel analogy again. “Aren’t you responsible for the outcomes the technology produces, in the same way you’re responsible for where the car goes? It can take you somewhere faster and more comfortably, but it’s your steering wheel. Use it accordingly.”
What’s next
Ask João what he’d love to build over the next year, and the answer comes with real energy, even if he’s quick to credit it as a shared ambition rather than his own roadmap.
“Our goal has always been to speed up transactions, to get people into their new homes faster. I’d love to build a workflow where errors and mismatches are detected up front, before they even become enquiries. Imagine knowing someone’s going to need an answer and giving it to them before they ask. Think of AI like a really great assistant that’s already thinking ahead.”
Outside of AI
Away from the day job, João keeps things grounded. “I’m a proud husband and father of two, which takes up about ninety nine percent of my time. The other one percent, whenever I can, I train for triathlons.”
And the advice he’d give his younger self starting out a decade ago? “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t take it personally. Don’t overthink it. You’ve got to fail with grace and keep going.”
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