Agenda

In this opening address, we set the stage for a day dedicated to the modern CFO agenda – where finance leaders are no longer just managing risk and reporting numbers, but steering technology strategy, driving business model reinvention, and enabling enterprise-wide resilience. We’ll explore what it means to lead in today’s volatile, AI-powered economy, introduce the key themes of the day, under pinned by unique Australian insights from ADAPT – and preview the sessions and speakers shaping the future of finance.

A high-voltage, no-spin conversation between two of Australia’s sharpest minds: Victor Dominello, the digital-government architect, and Dom Price, work futurist, and team doctor.

They’ll zero in on what CFOs must understand, unlearn, and do now in the fast-shifting terrain of AI, tech, and work. CFOs will leave with a blueprint – not just for survival, but for leadership in Australia’s immediate future.

• Transformation at Scale – Lessons from Service NSW, Digital ID, and data platforms on doing digital right.
• Trust at Speed – Driving tech investment while safeguarding ethics, transparency, and user trust.
• People & AI at Work – Reshaping teams, tools, and culture for effectiveness, not just efficiency.
• Metrics that Matter – From output to outcomes: CX, impact, data responsibility, and resilience.
• Risk & Resilience – Tackling technical debt, security, regulation, and the digital divide with adaptive strategies.
• Leading in Uncertainty – Guiding organisations through AI disruption and crisis with agility and foresighted.

The Hon. Victor Dominello
CEO of Future Government Institute | Co-Founder, ServiceGen | Service Transformation Expert

Victor Dominello is a globally recognised leader in public sector transformation and a pioneer of secure, citizen-focused digital identity.

A former NSW Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government, he created world-first reforms including the Department of Customer Service, Service NSW, and the Digital Restart Fund. His innovations, such as the digital driver’s licence, QR check-ins, and vaccine certificates, have set global benchmarks.

Victor’s leadership has been recognised worldwide. He was named to the Okta Identity 25 list of global visionaries, with his image featured on the Nasdaq Tower in Times Square. Today, as CEO of the Future Government Institute and Co-Founder of ServiceGen, he advises governments and organisations worldwide, including the World Bank. He also contributes to national policy, recently participating in the Treasurer’s Economic Reform Roundtable on efficient and high-quality government services.

As a work futurist, formerly with Atlassian, Dom Price was the in-house ‘team doctor’, designing collaborative patterns which are easily adaptable for any purpose.

But he doesn’t believe it’s enough to simply make predictions about the future, or even just prepare for it. What sets Dom apart is his ability to inspire people to transform their working lives, and with it, their futures. This person-centred approach has established him as a thought leader, at the forefront of the zeitgeist that is life at work in the years ahead.

Dom has a galvanising take on people, practices, technology, and workspaces – being passionate about filling the gap between knowledge and action.

His experience in global strategic positions across the fields of technology and finance, as well as extensive travel to fifty countries, has informed a unique perspective on the future of work. One which values interconnectedness but never forgets the individual at the core of even the largest scale operation.

AI has moved beyond the hype. It’s now at the heart of top-performing finance teams. Today’s forward-thinking finance leaders aren’t just automating processes; they’re redefining the strategic value their function delivers to the business. This session will unpack what an AI-enabled finance function looks like in action and why strong foundations in people, process, data, and governance are critical for sustained success. You will gain an understanding of how your private data drives unique outcomes for your organisation and how leading CFOs are shifting from reactive analysis to predictive, frictionless operations that drive strategic growth.

ADAPT’s research team reveal the latest local fact-based insights from over 5000 interactions and 2000 detailed surveys with our region’s top CIOs, CISO, CFOs, CTOs, and digital leaders. This session will assist you in comparing the resource allocation, investment priorities and unique challenges of Australian CFOs for you to benchmark and validate your priorities and thinking. Gabby will reveal the core findings distilled from your aggregated pre-event surveys and examine the AI and tech strategies that are generating value – focused on what the top performers are doing differently to scale AI success through a CFO lens.

In a world defined by economic upheaval, geopolitical volatility, and rapid technological advancement, CFOs face unprecedented pressure to deliver tangible value – immediately, not eventually.

Through a focused look at the agentic organisation, this session will cut through the noise around agentic AI to explore how leading organisations are shifting from proof-of-concept to enterprise-scale productivity, and what that means for finance leaders.

As businesses transition from isolated AI experiments to enterprise-wide implementation, finance leaders must navigate a new landscape of opportunity and accountability where embedding agentic AI into core workflows is accelerating value capture, reshaping enterprise performance and demanding a pragmatic shift from ambition to action.

Solly will explore:

• What CFOs should now expect from AI beyond the experimentation phase
• Why scaling requires a shift from scattered use cases to domain-driven investment
• Practical case of agentic AI at scale, with productivity and value capture in mind

AI and decision intelligence are shifting finance from reporting to anticipating. A forward-looking session showing how CFOs are building intelligent operations that power predictive, autonomous finance.

– Data as capital: unifying financial and operational data for insight
– Automating forecasting, compliance, and decisioning
– Funding innovation: budgeting for AI and future tech responsibly

As CFOs modernise the financial core, they face the dual challenge of unlocking ERP value while addressing technical debt head-on. ADAPT research has shown Australia’s weakness at FinOps, cloud cost management and tech debt. In this session we unpack how finance leaders are designing agile, intelligent finance stacks to power future-ready operations.

• Tips for effective FinOps
• Quantifying and governing technical debt as a financial risk
• Building business cases that fund transformation while managing operating leverage