Agenda

Technology now differentiates how and when companies achieve their organisational objectives – and CFOs need to navigate and lead tech investments and operating models.

The goals of modern business are resilience, efficiency, speed, security, compliance, revenues, and data driven innovation – all while reducing costs.

Everyone is somewhere on their modernisation, data, and AI roadmap – whilst dealing with complexity and trying to simplify.

Facing challenges of technical debt, limited resources, and lack of visibility on value, and with emerging technology soon demanding more – how can you ensure your organisational policy, processes and predictions are fit-for-purpose in the digital age?

To debate how is the goal of CFO Edge – a powerful day of content and introductions – giving Australian Heads of Finance access to each other, and experts, to debate the best ways to execute on their ever-evolving role.

ADAPT’s Research and Advisory service of fact-based insights are based upon 25,000 interactions and surveys of our region’s digital and IT leaders running over 60% of Australia’s GDP – more than any other advisory firm in our region. Gabby reveals the core findings distilled from your aggregated pre-event surveys and those of your executive CFO, CIO, Data, Digital and Security peers to show your common aims, investments, workload stats and funding plans – while reviewing solutions to your group challenges and barriers to delivery.

What do CEOs and CFOs want from AI, and what do they actually get? Peter will share the findings from MIT’s study on the value, maturity, and performance impact of AI. The session will include feedback on your pre-event survey questions and an instant poll on the day to help measure where you are.

In this digital and AI world of exponential change leaders need a framework to make sense of chaos, benchmarking where they are today and providing a line of sight into where they need to go. To help provide this guidance MIT CISR has created a four-stage AI Maturity model with data from over 700 firms globally. We identify the percentage of firms in each stage and describe the key characteristics and metrics by stage. We will show how financial performance improves over the four stages, with big jumps between stages two and three. Case studies illustrate the journey. Finally, Peter will ask participants to identify which stage they’re in now and how they will build the capabilities to progress through the stages to become top performers.

As Chair of CISR at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Boston, Peter’s work centres on the role, value, and governance of digitisation in enterprises. Now relocated to Australia, he consults several of Australia’s and the world’s leading CIOs, ExCos and Boards. Peter was nominated for the 2023 Thinkers-50 based on his new book, Future Ready, and was ranked by Ziff Davis as the 24th most influential person in IT and the highest ranking academic. MIT CISR undertakes practical research on how firms generate business value from digital.

In times of rapid change, finance leaders are on the lookout for cutting-edge strategies to enable and empower their people. As finance broadens into business strategy and digital transformation, the role of finance professionals has become critical, serving as strategic catalysts for organisational growth.

Join Oracle and a Finance leader as they discuss how the finance function can leverage predictive data and automation to align more closely with the organisation’s overarching goals, driving greater growth, reducing costs, and boosting productivity. This fireside chat will also explore how leading organisations utilise their data to predict and prepare for future challenges, streamline processes, and foster a culture of innovation.

Key Discussion Areas:

• Pioneers of Excellence – How the role of finance has shifted towards driving innovation and excellence across the organisation
• AI-driven Success – How predictive analytics and reporting is playing a critical role in anticipating trends and opportunities
• Empower and Delight – Giving time back to your people though automation to streamline financial processes and reduce manual tasks
• Processes to Success – Leveraging key functions to remove administrative tasks, eliminate complexity, and reduce costs

CFOs play a vital role in data governance, data protection, privacy engineering, compliance, supply chains, and metrics across every business.

We now live in a world where bad data means customer churn, making all responsible for good Data Quality and Governance frameworks.

Michelle will share 9 steps to improve the people, process, and tech components of data frameworks.
Talking on how to incorporate privacy into your organisational efforts and how to get the most out of your work.

• What are the risks in 2025?
• What needs to go into CFO metrics? How to control data and privacy risks
• Managing data governance and communication between C-level and cross functional groups
• Getting ready to cope with and manage the data and ethical impacts of AI
• Frameworks to associate a dollar $ figure with your data efforts

As a CFO, data is key to help manage uncertainty, risk, and liability.

Michelle was VP & Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco as well as McAfee, where she raised awareness and create tools to promote privacy, quality, respect, trust, and asset-level possibilities for data. As a visionary in the field of privacy and the IT industry, she brings together multifaceted approaches that provide real privacy protections to drive business value. A licensed attorney, Michelle led security and privacy initiatives, ranging from regulatory compliance, privacy engineering, advocacy and education efforts, and litigation. She is the co-author of ‘The Privacy Engineer’s Manifesto: Getting from Policy to Code to QA to Value.’

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, CFOs and finance leaders face unprecedented challenges in harnessing the vast amounts of data at their disposal. With financial operations and strategies hinging on real-time, accurate insights, the dilemma lies not just in managing data but in transforming it into an asset that drives growth, agility, and resilience.

This keynote panel acknowledges how automation technologies such as, Co-pilots, Intelligent Automation and data analytics are reshaping finance’s approach to enterprise data and shares insights into how DXC is tackling the data dilemma for their customers and turning complexity into progress.

A distinguished DXC panel will share stories from the field and how we are solving our customers’ data challenges, while identifying AI’s strategic potential across the vendor landscape through an SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft lens.
Discover how these technologies are innovating and empowering finance leaders to solve the data dilemma, unlocking new opportunities for innovation and paving the way for data-driven leadership.

CFOs are facing with a barrage of challenges in today’s uncertain environment…..a looming recession, inflation risks, reduced profit margins, demanding investors and regulators and an unsettled workforce….and it doesn’t stop there!

Alteryx Analytics platform is critical to transform Finance and help CFOs not only improve cost control and productivity, but also assess risks, identify optimisation and growth opportunities, and promote enterprise-wide integration.

This session outlines how!