Agenda
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
“Business and Operating Models in the Agentic Era”
Please note that 1:1 meetings will be running throughout the day.
Registration & Check-in
Secure your seat and table in the keynote room for the day.
Welcome to the 30th CIO Edge:
"Business & Operating Models in the Agentic AI Era"
Jim Berry
- CEO & Founder at ADAPT
Welcome to ADAPT’s 30th national gathering of Australian CIO and IT leaders from Enterprise and Government - with the cohort responsible for over 1/3 of AU GDP and 10% of the workforce.
The #1 Business Goal articulated by CIOs for 2026 is to “Grow the Business” - moving IT from a cost centre to a revenue and business enabler, while still delivering on Tech modernisation, Simplification and Scaled AI.
Critical to remaining relevant in the agentic age will be understanding and championing new business and operating models that evolve the people, processes and platforms enabled by the tech strategy. CIOs will lead this alignment and then communicate value to all the stakeholders to help sustain the change.
As we embrace Agentic on that journey: What is possible over the next 5-10 years? What will be the cost if we get it wrong? Why rearchitecting workflows needs to be the centre of any Agentic conversation today? Why CIOs need to start thinking beyond co-pilot execution in their AI roadmap?
Join your CIO community, experts and ADAPT for the day to find answers to these critical questions and enable business led change.
ADAPT Australian Maturity & Performance Insights
Gabby Fredkin - Head of Analytics & Insights at ADAPT
ADAPT’s research team reveal the latest local fact-based insights from over 5000 interactions and 1000 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 CIOs 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 technology strategies that are generating value - focused on what the top performers are doing differently.
Get an Edge: Making the Most of Your Day
Shannon Barry - Senior Community Success Manager at ADAPT
The Enterprise Architect:
Leading Transformation and Resilience at National Scale
Charles McHardie AM
- CIDO at Services Australia
Matt Boon
- Senior Research Director at ADAPT
Charles McHardie AM, CIDO at Services Australia, shares unfiltered insights on architecting a 10-year digital foundation, balancing stability with agentic AI innovation, and leading one of the nation’s most complex technology estates.
- Architecting the future enterprise: Designing a 10-year technology strategy that can support intelligent service layers without compromising core stability.
- Driving modular modernisation: Why continuous, modular improvement of existing architecture beats disruptive “rip and replace” programs.
- AI at scale: Moving beyond pilots to apply GenAI across development, testing, operations, and cyber resilience.
- The intersection of resilience and service delivery: How early detection, unified observability, and sovereign capability ensure critical platforms (myGov, Medicare, Centrelink) never miss a beat.
- Evolving the IT operating model: Building an adaptive, cross-agency digital skills campus to uplift capability and align technical strategy with executive intent.
Foundations First: How CIOs Scale AI with Data, Security and Choice
Stephen Bovis - Regional Managing Director, ANZ at Oracle
As AI moves from pilot to production, CIOs need the right foundations to scale with confidence. This session explores how trusted data, security by design, and freedom of choice across models, clouds and architectures help organisations build and scale enterprise AI.
Morning Break: Refreshments, Snacks & Connections
Solving the Right Problem: Architecting Workflows, Operating Models, and ROI for the Agentic AI Era
Lynden Roberts - Chief Medical Information Officer at Monash Health Simon Moorfield - Group Executive, Customer and Technology at Transurban Deepika DiGiovine - Global VP Technology at BHP Peter Hind - Principal Research Analyst at ADAPT
- Reality Check: Is the real barrier to AI scale technical complexity, or broken workflows?
- Productivity Trap: How do we transition from personal productivity tools to true agentic workflows?
- Engineering Adoption: As AI-driven operational models take shape, how are you engineering a culture that wants to adopt the workflows that you are redesigning?
- Data Bottleneck: How do we reframe data hygiene from a back-office IT cost to a board-level revenue constraint?
- CFO Disconnect: How do we stop selling generic “hours saved” and prove hard long-term financial ROI?
The Network Inflection Point - Transforming Capabilities for Tomorrow
Sebastien Mock - Executive of Industry Value Creation at Telstra
Join Sebastien Mock to explore how Telstra’s Network as a Product strategy is re-inventing connectivity for the era of AI, security and resiliency.
As organisations scale AI, CIOs are balancing innovation with increasing complexity, risk, and regulatory pressure. Network capability is no longer just an infrastructure, it is the strategic platform to enabling performance, security, and controlled execution at scale.
In this session, discover how Telstra Network as a Product is transforming connectivity to enable our customer to tailor their network needs with speed, scale and confidence.
From Operational Resilience to Business Value:
Simplifying Complexity in the Age of AI
Thought Leader at Splunk
CIOs are under pressure to prove that operational resilience is not just a safeguard, but a driver of revenue protection, productivity, and customer trust.
This keynote explores how stronger observability can help technology leaders reduce complexity, prevent costly disruption earlier, and turn IT performance into measurable business outcomes.
- Resilience is becoming a commercial lever, not just a technical KPI.
- Greater visibility helps CIOs cut noise, cost, and operational drag.
- Predictive operations can reduce downtime before it hits customers and revenue.
- Agentic observability opens the door to faster decisions and smarter remediation.
ADAPT Executive Insight Roundtables
Share with confidence under the Chatham House Rule. Attend your preselected roundtable to participate in a peer discussion moderated by ADAPT analysts with subject matter experts.
AI Changes Everything: What Must Change for AI to Scale with Confidence?
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Stephen Bovis - Regional Managing Director, ANZ at Oracle and your peers
As AI moves from experimentation to enterprise scale, CIOs are navigating a new set of questions: where to focus, how to scale, what to measure, and how to bring the organisation with them. Join CIO peers for an open discussion on what’s working, what’s getting in the way, and where leadership teams need to focus next.
Demystify the Future of Work - People, Money, Agents
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Shan Moorthy, CTO at Workday
The future of work isn’t just about new technology; it’s about managing a new kind of team. As of late 2025, only 14%* of enterprises had implemented AI agents, yet the potential to automate repetitive tasks and surface real-time insights is immense. During this session we will explore the agentic maturity journey. We will share insights on reskilling teams for AI literacy, modeling trust through human-in-the-loop governance, and overcoming the cultural resistance that follows early-stage AI disappointments.
Learn how a staged use-case approach—moving from information retrieval to autonomous task execution—allows Victorian departments/agencies to scale smart, start small, and finally deliver on the promise of AI-enhanced productivity. * Workday Realising ROI from AI Agents in Finance report.
Is ERP Dead? What Comes Next in the Age of Agentic AI?
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Joe Locandro, EVP & Global CIO at Rimini Street
Traditional ERP thinking is being rewritten.
Agentic AI is shifting how work gets done and forcing leaders to question long held assumptions about monolithic suites, vendor roadmaps, and the belief that modernization must come through disruption.
This boardroom is an open, peer level conversation designed to explore where ERP is really heading and how technology leaders should be preparing for right now.
We will examine how agentic AI is unbundling ERP responsibilities, reshaping process orchestration, and enabling more intelligent service layers that sit above existing systems. Rather than pushing upgrades or platforms, this session focuses on the ideas, patterns, and signals that matter for predicting the next era of enterprise operations.
Join fellow CIOs and technology leader to explore:
- Why monolithic ERP models are losing relevance and what is replacing them
- What assumptions every CIO should challenge when evaluating vendor roadmaps
- How agentic AI is redefining the role of ERP in the enterprise
The Small Bang Theory: Operationalising AI by Modernising Your Estate, Piece by Piece
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Nick Sone, Chief Customer Officer and Peter Soulsby, Director of Cybersecurity at Brennan.
Join us for a candid peer-lead discussion on what it really takes to operationalise AI when budgets are tight, delivery expectations are rising, and the foundations underneath are still evolving.
Every CIO is under pressure to move faster with AI. Yet few organisations can afford to modernise everything before getting started. The reality is often less linear than expected: buy it, use it, break it, fix it.
Brennan’s Nick Sone (Chief Customer Officer) and Peter Soulsby (Director of Cybersecurity & Government) alongside Adapts Byron Connell, will be posing these questions to understand how leaders are balancing innovation with control, maintaining accountability as AI scales, and ensuring value, security and performance continue long after launch.
- When you compress delivery to move at AI speed, what comes under pressure first?
- Who owns a non-human identity across its whole life, and could you cleanly decommission it tomorrow?
- Where’s the honest line between moving at the pace of the technology and the pace your controls can govern?
- When your AI makes a call that lands on a real person outside your organisation, does your governance know they exist?
Unpacking the SAP Data Ecosystem: Accelerating Innovation Across Your Cloud Environment
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with SAP and your peers
Join us for an exclusive roundtable discussion featuring industry leaders and experts as we explore the expanding SAP data partner ecosystem and its transformative impact on modern enterprise strategy. This session goes beyond a single partnership, taking a panoramic view of how SAP’s deep integrations with Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS are collectively redefining what’s possible in data management, AI, and intelligent decision-making. As organisations increasingly operate across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, understanding how these strategic alliances work together — and independently — is critical to unlocking the full value of SAP data.
This dynamic, interactive roundtable will give participants the opportunity to:
- Explore cross-platform use cases that span multiple cloud environments and data platforms
- Address common challenges such as data portability, governance, latency, and data ownership
- Identify opportunities for innovation at the intersection of SAP business data and modern cloud-native capabilities
- Discuss emerging trends in AI, data lakehouse architecture, and real-time analytics as they apply to SAP workloads
The session is designed to encourage open, candid dialogue among practitioners, architects, and IT leaders and will provide actionable outcomes for organisations at every stage of their SAP cloud and data transformation journey.
Peer Networking Seating Lunch
Lunch Roundtable: Designed to Scale: The Architecture Behind AI You Can Trust
A lunch boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Ian Christie, Head of Data and AI at Fujitsu and Ashok Govindaraju, Partner at Uvance Wayfinders Consulting by Fujitsu.
Ian Christie - Head of AI & Data at Fujitsu Ashok Govindaraju - Partner, Uvance Wayfinders, Consulting at Fujitsu Matt Boon - Senior Research Director at ADAPT
The easy wins are done. Over lunch, we get past the pilots and into the question that actually decides whether AI scales: what has to be true in your architecture for it to be trusted, governable and worth the spend? A candid exchange on the design calls sitting underneath the hype.
Discussion points:
- Everyone has scaled something by now - but is it paying off? What is a credible, board-ready read on AI value beyond activity and adoption?
- The real question is not which model, it is what has to be true in the architecture - what data sits where, and which workloads can and cannot rely on a public model?
- Sovereignty is about controlling inference, data flows and trust boundaries, not building everything yourself - so where does it genuinely matter, and where is it over-engineering?
- SaaS automation, AI assistants, agentic orchestration - how do you decide where each belongs, and who owns that call?
ADAPT Executive Insight Roundtables
Share with confidence under the Chatham House Rule. Attend your preselected roundtable to participate in a peer discussion moderated by ADAPT analysts with subject matter experts.
New Frictions New Frontiers - The Executive vs. Employee Tug-of-war on Enterprise AI Adoption
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Cognizant and your peers
Cognizant’s will soon launch their New Frictions New Frontiers research, which studies the enterprise struggle to realise tangible ROI and “hyperproductivity” from their AI endeavors.
Last year’s bold MIT headline claimed that only 5% of AI pilots were able to extract value, but we know this isn’t a complete picture. In reality, organisations have deeply complex internal dynamics and sources of friction that can prevent AI from being leveraged to its fullest extent.
A key exploration area in this research is the “leadership disconnect with frontline realities”. We have witnessed an “Executive vs. employee tug-of-war” where strategic intent doesn’t reconcile with lived experience.
This roundtable aims to delve into this crucial perception gap and frictions it creates, exploring why AI’s promise remains unfulfilled for many, and how organisations can better align their strategic momentum with employee readiness to successfully embed AI deeply and effectively across the enterprises.
Financial Intelligence Roundtable: Speak the New Language of Value with AI-Accelerated TBM
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Michael Coates, Senior Solutions Consulting, Mona Lolas Marketing Director APAC at Apptio and your peers
In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, CIOs are under growing pressure to control IT spend while clearly demonstrating business value. Yet many organisations still lack the visibility needed to confidently manage technology investments making financial intelligence a critical capability for modern IT leadership
This roundtable, powered by AI-accelerated TBM solutions from Apptio, will bring together CIOs and senior technology leaders to explore how to better connect cost, performance, and outcomes. The discussion will focus on practical ways to move beyond traditional IT financial management and adopt a more strategic, data-driven approach to decision-making.
Participants will share insights on how to gain deeper visibility into technology spend, eliminate inefficiencies, and build stronger alignment with finance and business stakeholders—all while continuing to support innovation and growth.
Key discussion areas include:
- Establishing and maturing an IT Financial Management (ITFM) capability through a practical, structured approach
- Gaining granular visibility into technology spend across on-premises and cloud environments
- Identifying opportunities to reduce waste and optimise costs without limiting innovation
- Building trust and transparency with stakeholders through a shared financial language
- Balancing fiscal discipline with the need to invest in future-focused technologies
This interactive session is designed for leaders looking to strengthen financial intelligence, improve control over IT spend, and elevate how they communicate the value of technology across the business.
Cyber Resilience by Design: Becoming a Hard Target
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Adam Hartwig - Account Executive at ThreatLocker and your peers
From a technology leadership perspective, cyber resilience means designing systems and operations that minimize exposure, constrain impact, and sustain the business under attack. While an organisation’s inherent value to adversaries may be fixed, its susceptibility is not. This discussion focuses on the practical actions leaders can take to reduce attack surface, strengthen core controls, and limit lateral movement—making the organisation demonstrably harder to compromise and more resilient when incidents occur.
Beyond Pilots - Redesigning Work for Enterprise AI Value
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Harshu Deshpande - VP - Product & Engineering at Publicis Sapient and your peers
Most organisations have proven AI works—but few have redesigned their business to capture its full value. This roundtable explores how leading enterprises are moving beyond isolated use cases to rewire processes, operating models, and value chains—unlocking productivity, growth, and measurable ROI at scale.
- Where are you truly redesigning processes, not just sprinkling AI?
- Which journeys or value chains are your best candidates for redesign?
- How do you pick one “lighthouse” use case to prove change?
- What guardrails keep experimentation safe but fast enough for impact?
- How do you track productivity and value once agents enter workflows?
Afternoon Break: Refreshments + Snacks served in lobby from 15:15
Transformation Projects Fail without Upgrading the “Human Operating System"
Dom Price - Work Futurist and Visionary at Be Luminous Dayle Stevens OAM - Data and AI Executive at Telstra
As AI accelerates enterprise ambition, many organisations are upgrading their tech stack faster than their people stack.
Dom Price (Be Luminous, ex-Atlassian) sits down with Dayle Stevens OAM for a provocative fireside chat on why transformation efforts stall - and how to fix them.
This session explores the often-overlooked “human operating system”:
- The mindsets, behaviours, rituals, and leadership habits that determine whether change actually sticks.
- Balancing velocity with sustainability and avoiding cultural debt
- Designing organisations where humans and machines don’t just coexist - but compound each other’s impact.
Less about tools, more about traction. This is a discussion for leaders who know that the future of work isn’t just built, it’s behaved
Scaling AI: A Practical Guide to Getting Value from AI
David Walker - (Former) Group Chief Technology Officer at Westpac & DBS and ADAPT Advisor
This session delivers actionable insights and lessons from a leading CTO on why digital transformation stalls at the human layer and how CIOs can clear adoption blockers to accelerate value through people, process, and pace.
-The CIO’s Priority: What is changing right now, and how do leaders adapt?
- The adoption paradox: Diagnosing the culture, process, and talent gaps that disguise themselves as technology failures.
- The success mandate: Practical leadership strategies to align workforce capability and operational pace with digital ambition.
CIO Town Hall:
What's on the Mind of A/NZ CIOs Leading Tech for 30% of Our GDP?
Dr. Peter Weill
- Chairman, CISR at MIT & ADAPT Advisor
This town hall reflects CIOs’ priorities of AI integration, operational excellence, and modernising legacy systems to drive growth, resilience, and innovation in 2025.
- Where does your organisation stand on the 4-stage Enterprise AI maturity model?
- What AI-driven approaches are working, and how are you leveraging autonomous agents today?
- What key issues and opportunities are top of mind for tech leaders in ANZ?
- Peer brainstorming to tackle your biggest technology challenges or uncover new growth avenues.
- Discuss strategies to achieve agility and responsiveness for top-tier performance.
- Explore how leading AI and digital transformation projects can shape your professional legacy.
- Preview insights from upcoming MIT CISR research on how to integrate and lead AI-powered collaborators effectively.
Closing Comments
CIO Edge Peer Networking Drinks
An opportunity to stay, mingle and meet other attendees over drinks and food and discuss the day.