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.

Join an exclusive fireside chat with Yvonne McGill, Chief Financial Officer of Dell Technologies – a global a global firm, 48th in the Fortune 500 that helps organisations build their digital future with an innovative technology and services portfolio for the AI era.

Yvonne will offer invaluable insights into the pivotal role of the CFO in guiding the financial strategy of a large, complex, and global organisation. This engaging discussion will explore how financial leadership drives strategic decision-making, enhances operational efficiency, mitigates economic uncertainties, and fosters long-term innovation and sustainable growth – particularly in the transformative era of AI. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain fresh perspectives on financial stewardship and the evolving responsibilities of CFOs in today’s fast-paced global economy.

Yvonne oversees all aspects of Dell Technologies’ finance function, including Accounting, Financial Planning and Analysis, Tax, Treasury and Investor Relations, as well as Corporate Development, Global Business Operations and Dell Financial Services. She also partners closely with the office of the CEO to develop and execute a long-term strategy that creates value for Dell Technologies’ stakeholders. Yvonne joined Dell Technologies in 1997 and has held various leadership positions prior to assuming the CFO role, including Dell Technologies corporate controller and CFO of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, CFO of Asia-Pacific, Japan and China business, and Chief Accounting Officer.

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