Agenda
Wednesday, 1 April 2026
“Data Driven Operating Models & Industrialising AI”
Please note that 1:1 meetings will be running throughout the day.
Registration & Check-in
Secure your seat in the keynote room for the day.
Welcome to the 5th Data & AI Edge: "Data Driven Operating Models & Industrialising AI
Jim Berry - CEO & Founder at ADAPT
Many organisations remain stuck in the early stages of AI maturity, experimenting without ever realising measurable business value. True ROI begins with industrialisation — building scalable platforms, re-usable models, modern data architectures, strong governance, and operating models that turn pilots into enterprise-wide impact.
Data & AI Edge once again brings together the region’s leading thinkers to collaborate on practical ways to strengthen these foundations: reducing fragmentation, improving trust and governance, integrating systems, and ensuring data is truly AI-ready.
We proudly deliver Australia’s leading event for outcome-based content, actionable research, and meaningful introductions — giving you ideas you’ll remember and capabilities you can apply as soon as you return to the business.
What are the Top Performers Doing Differently?
Gabby Fredkin - Head of Analytics & Insights at ADAPT
ADAPT’s research team will unveil the latest evidence-based insights drawn from over 5,000 executive interactions and 1,000 in-depth surveys with the region’s leading CIOs, CISOs, CFOs, CTOs, Data and Digital Transformation leaders. This session helps you compare resource allocation, investment priorities, and the emerging challenges facing Australian technology executives — enabling you to benchmark and validate your own direction.
Gabby will distil the core themes from your aggregated pre-event surveys and highlight the technology strategies that are delivering real value, with a focus on what top-performing organisations are doing differently to scale success and value.
Get an Edge: Making the Most of Your Day
Rachel Rock - Director of Executive Programs Engagement & Delegate Acquisition
Armchair Discussion: AI at the Edges - Redesigning the Operating Model for the Core
Katarina Dulanovic - General Manager Data Office at Allianz Australia & Global Group CDO Advisor for Data & AI at Allianz
A critical dialogue on why traditional business structures are stifling AI scalability and how organisations must fundamentally reinvent their architecture to move innovation from the periphery to the centre of the enterprise
– Moving beyond the “illusion of adoption” where AI remains an ornamental novelty at the edges of the business rather than a core capability.
– Dismantling the rigid legacy hierarchies that prevent cross-functional agility and trap AI initiatives at the edges of the business.
– Establishing the data-native governance and decision-making frameworks required to transform AI from a novelty into a strategic core capability
Shaping the Future of Real Estate with AI-Driven Data Insight
Pooyan Asgari - Chief Data Officer at Domain Group
– The convergence of AI and real-time aerial intelligence is redefining how Australians understand property markets.
– Empowering stakeholders with transparent, high-resolution data fosters smarter, more confident property decisions.
– Leadership in responsible AI adoption is essential to drive trust, innovation, and accurate market intelligence at scale.
– Domain’s vision under Pooyan Asgari emphasises data democratisation as a catalyst for transforming the real estate landscape
Accelerating Enterprise AI: Unlocking Barriers to Execution and Adoption
Angelo Joseph - Head of Cloud Engineering ANZ at Oracle Johann Kruse - Director Strategic AI Partnerships at NVIDIA
Gain first-hand insights from NVIDIA’s GTC 2026 and Oracle’s AI World Tour from ANZ’s leading AI experts.
This session explores how organisations can accelerate enterprise AI adoption—from strategy to scale—while addressing critical challenges around governance, regulation, and security. Discover practical approaches to overcoming execution barriers and realising tangible business outcomes with responsible, scalable AI.
Morning Break: Refreshments, Snacks and Connections
Data and AI Edge Panel: Data Driven Operating Models & Industrialising AI
Mike Lau - CDAO at ADHA Lauren Beard - Head of AI Enablement at Ventia Samrat Seal - Head of Transformation and Governance - AI and Cyber at Kmart Group Satya Tammareddy - Head of GTM, ANZ at OpenAI
– Closing the Readiness Gap: How do leaders effectively bridge the AI readiness gap through visionary governance, a focus on local skills challenges, and scalable data foundations?
– Industrialisation of AI: What does moving “beyond pilots” to true industrialised, enterprise-wide AI really involve?
– Balancing Innovation & Responsibility: How can businesses successfully balance rapid innovation with robust governance, practical ethics, and proactive risk management?
– Proving the Value Proposition: Beyond the hype, how can CDOs and CAIOs consistently prove the measurable business value and ROI of their core data strategy initiatives
Unlocking the Power of AI: From Data Chaos to Business Clarity
John Roese - Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer at Dell Technologies
John Roese leads the company’s technology strategy and AI initiatives to drive innovation and human progress. With a career spanning enterprise, telecom, semiconductors, and security, John has held senior roles at Nortel, Broadcom, and Futurewei before joining Dell in 2012. He holds 20+ patents, is a published author, and was recently ranked #1 on AI Magazine’s Top 10 Chief AI Officers. John also serves on boards including Xerox, Purdue Research Foundation, and the Open Source Software Foundation.
In today’s data-driven world, organisations are grappling with the challenge of turning vast, fragmented data into actionable insights that drive innovation and measurable business outcomes.
Discover how Dell Technologies is empowering businesses to:
– Build scalable, AI-ready data ecosystems with robust governance and security.
– Leverage advanced AI platforms to surface hidden insights and accelerate decision-making.
– Balance rapid innovation with ethical responsibility to ensure sustainable growth.
Through real-world examples and forward-thinking strategies, this session will showcase how Dell Technologies is helping organisations reduce risk, unlock value, and create a future-ready workforce equipped to thrive in the age of AI.
Connecting Your Organisation to Trusted Data Sources Using MCP
Ajay Kumar - Head of MCP Services at InfoTrack
For the first time, AI can interact with systems in a coordinated, task-driven and auditable manner. With MCP AI, the Model Context Protocol, organisations gain a universal gateway that enables secure robot-to-robot and agent-to-agent communication across the high-trust environments they rely on.
In this keynote, Ajay demonstrates how you can eliminate friction from critical data sources and empower developers to build at velocity.
Learn how to access authoritative government data through an MCP gateway that unlocks entirely new possibilities for agentic AI workflows within commercial organisations, enabling processes that were previously too fragmented, too labour-intensive, or too constrained by legacy systems to automate effectively. Propel your AI agent to take on structured work with consistency, transparency, and scale.
The opportunity for CIOs and CTOs is clear, when intelligent agents can safely use trusted external data as part of a programmable workflow, entire categories of operational bottlenecks disappear, and new forms of competitive advantage emerge.
ADAPT Executive Insight Roundtables
Attend your pre-selected roundtable to participate in a peer discussion with confidence under Chatham House Rule moderated by an ADAPT analyst with subject matter experts.
AI Strategy Deep Dive - Navigating the Path to Scalable AI
Angelo Joseph - Head of Cloud Engineering ANZ at Oracle Johann Kruse - Director Strategic AI Partnerships at NVIDIA
Leaders today must bridge the widening gap between AI’s promise and its operational reality. The challenge: moving from isolated pilots to scalable, enterprise-grade AI use cases built on trusted, integrated data foundations that deliver measurable outcomes. Join ADAPT’s Matt Boon, AI experts from Oracle and NVIDIA and your peers for this roundtable discussion exploring how to overcome barriers to execution and adoption. Engage with your peers to address shared challenges and exchange proven strategies driving real organisational impact. What’s holding you back?
Discussion themes include:
– Reducing fragmentation and improving trust through strong governance
– Integrating systems and ensuring data is truly AI-ready
– Breaking through PoC barriers for agentic and generative AI
– Establishing and maintaining data hygiene standards for scale
– Setting governance and security guardrails for autonomous intelligence
– Balancing innovation and risk to accelerate enterprise advantage
From Data Silos to Enterprise Data Readiness: Rethinking Operating Models for Continuous AI Deployment
Marie Holmes - ANZ Country Manager at Alteryx
Organisations stuck in AI pilot purgatory share a common problem: their operating models treat AI as special projects rather than continuous capabilities. Moving from experimental to operational AI requires fundamental changes in how teams collaborate, how data flows through the organisation, and how business logic integrates into analytical workflows. This roundtable examines the operating model shifts that enable repeatable AI deployment, breaking down technical and organisational silos, creating governed self-service capabilities that empower business users, and building the connective tissue between raw data and business decisions. We’ll discuss the cultural and technical changes required and how to measure whether your operating model actually supports AI at scale
Observing the AI: Measuring the P&L of Your Generative Models
Chris Lee - Observability Specialist Solutions Lead, APJC at Splunk Gordon Noble - Observability Specialist at Splunk
You know your AI is running, but do you know if it’s profitable? “It works” is no longer the bar for success – ROI is. This session explores how to treat AI Observability as a financial governance tool. By correlating technical metrics (latency, token usage) with business outcomes (customer conversion, churn), we can finally answer the board’s question: “Is this AI actually making us money?
– A framework for tracking the “Cost per Answer” of your internal and external AI agents
– How real-time drift detection prevents “model decay” from damaging your brand reputation
– Practical insights into reporting AI health to the C-suite, translating “99.9% uptime” into “Revenue at Risk
More Context, More Trust, More Data: The New Currency for the Agentic Enterprise
with InformaticaIn the era of autonomous AI, data volume alone is no longer the differentiator – context is. Without it, your AI agents are effectively guessing, turning potential efficiency into operational risk. Join this exclusive roundtable to debate whether your data strategy is ready to support the shift from “passive insights” to “active agents.” We will challenge the status quo by exploring how to operationalise AI that demands more context to truly understand intent, more trust to ensure governance without compromise, and more data accessibility to fuel industrial-scale innovation without piling up technical debt.
Key Discussion Points:
– The “Trusted Memory” Gap: Why AI models hallucinate without the semantic grounding of metadata and lineage.
– Context as Currency: Strategies to enrich your data estate to provide the deep “why” and “how” that autonomous agents require.
– From Islands to Intelligence: Bridging fragmented systems to create a unified, governable fuel source for measurable business value
Peer Networking Seated Lunch
Lunch RT | From 'Data Readiness' to AI 'Decision Readiness'– A More Practical Way to Think About Data Readiness
Chip Schenck - Principal, Generative AI and Data Strategy at IBM
Every enterprise today is rich in data, but value remains locked behind quality issues, siloed systems, inconsistent governance, skills gaps, and rising costs.
– Learn how leaders are modernising their data estates without disrupting the business
– How do you get your foundations AI ready?
– Walk away with actionable market insights and collaborative strategies for AI readiness.
ADAPT Executive Insight Roundtables
Attend your pre-selected roundtable to participate in a peer discussion with confidence under Chatham House Rules moderated by an ADAPT analyst with subject matter experts.
Trustworthy AI: The One Foundation Most Enterprises Lack
with DenodoAI is advancing faster than enterprise governance can keep up. While foundation models are powerful, they are effectively “blind” – unaware of your real-time context, business semantics, and policies. This is why high-potential AI pilots often fail to scale: they break when exposed to the complexity of enterprise data.
The solution isn’t to build more pipelines; It’s to use an operating layer that gives agents governed, contextual, policy aware access to live source data in place, on demand, with zero copy.
This session explores how leading enterprises (NEC, Dubai Dept of Finance, Mapfre) are using this approach to scale AI safely, confidently, and with measurable impact.
We will unpack how you can:
– Let agent builders self-serve governed, high-quality data without waiting on pipelines
– Enforce governance and compliance automatically across a fragmented enterprise
– Feed AI agents live, contextual, policy-aware data from anywhere – with zero duplication
– Create unified semantics so every model and person interprets data the same way
Stop blaming the model for hallucinations. Join this session to fix the foundation.
Securing Generative AI Across the Data Cloud
Dorothy Praga - Director, Alliances and Channels APAC Sanvy Sabapathee - Principal Solutions Engineer at Protegrity
Generative AI is no longer a future concept, it’s reshaping how businesses operate today. However, risk has become one of the biggest barriers to scaling AI, with growing concerns around compliance, sustainability and governance. For data leaders, the challenge isn’t whether to adopt AI, but how to do so safely and responsibly. Across industries, leaders are seeking ways to balance innovation with protection all while safeguarding sensitive data, preserving trust, and ensuring compliance across every stage of AI deployment.
This session brings together data leaders to share what is working, what remains challenging, and how organidations are approaching responsible AI. Attendees will hear how scalable platforms are enabling secure experimentation, model development, and deployment while maintaining full data governance. The conversation will focus on real lessons from the field and tangible practices that help teams run AI workloads anywhere with confidence and control.
The Brutal Truth: Why your 'Dark Data' Legacy is Starving your AI ROI
with Iron MountainStop digital hoarding and bridge physical archives with digital strategy to transform unstructured legacy data into a secure, compliant AI foundation.
– Conducting fiscally responsible triage to identify high-value records driving AI ROI.
– Extracting intelligence from physical archives and silos beyond modern cloud connectors.
– Enriching unstructured legacy content with metadata to power automated business workflows.
– Integrating historical archives into your current digital roadmap, eliminating data blindness.
– Ensuring a compliant, resilient, and sustainable transition from physical to cloud.
Attendees will walk away with a proven, actionable framework for auditing legacy information, bridging the gap between physical archives and modern cloud architecture to unlock measurable ROI from their AI investments
From Tech Leader to Business Architect: Revenue-Led AI With Trust
with AccentureA candid working session on building a revenue-led AI operating model that ships value quickly, without “trust theatre” or governance that paralyses delivery.
– How do CxOs shift from shipping technology to designing the AI operating model?
– What does “lead with value” mean: which revenue levers get first investment?
– What’s the minimum agent-ready core to scale safely: data, identity, security, integration, observability?
– Which governance model speeds revenue-led scale and turns trust into advantage?
Afternoon Break: Refreshments + Snacks
From Data Islands to Insights: Overcoming Barriers in the Golden Era of Data Democratisation
William MacMillan - Former CISO at CIA, CSO at Salesforce
In an era where data is the lifeblood of innovation, organisations still struggle with fragmentation, complexity, and risk. Join us for an exclusive conversation with one of the industry’s most influential voices – William MacMillan, former CISO of the CIA and former SVP for Information Security at Salesforce, now Chief Product Officer at Andesite, as he challenges the conventional thinking behind data democratisation – what the future really holds?
– Why traditional ETL and pipeline thinking blocks innovation
– Why and how to leave data where it lives
– Surfacing hidden insights in fragmented data without endless migration
– Reducing attack surface risk with less data copying
– API-driven access and secure collaboration
Sovereign AI: Reshaping Australia’s Future with Trusted, Responsible Intelligence
Dr. Jon Whittle - Former Managing Director of Data61 at CSIRO Simon Kriss - CEO at Sovereign AI Australia
AI is no longer just a technology – it’s a strategic asset shaping national security, economic advantage, and societal impact. In this exclusive armchair discussion, Dr. Jon Wittle, outgoing Managing Director of Data61 at CSIRO, and Simon Kriss, CEO of Sovereign AI Australia, share their perspectives on what true AI sovereignty means for Australia and how it will redefine our digital future.
– Why sovereignty matters in AI and what it means for Australia’s competitiveness
– Practical steps to scale AI responsibly
– Embedding ethics and trust at the core of AI innovation
– Diversity, inclusion, and societal impact
– Building the foundations for secure, sovereign AI infrastructure
– How do we measure sovereignty in the field of AI?
Beyond the Pilot: From Grassroots AI to Enterprise-Wide Value
Danny Liu - Professor in Educational Technologies at University of Sydney
The journey from a promising AI pilot to enterprise-wide industrialisation is the single greatest challenge facing data and AI leaders today.
Hear from Professor Danny Liu, the visionary behind Cogniti, who will unpack the story of how a grassroots movement in a university became a blueprint for scaling AI, with over 2,500 agents now deployed across Australia. He will share the critical lessons learned in identifying high-value use cases by focusing on a principle that transcends any single domain: empowering experts to scale their unique human capabilities.
Discover how this approach, first proven in education, is now inspiring solutions for public interest, community services, and complex professional fields. Learn how he fostered a culture of innovation and built a governance framework that empowers, rather than restricts. A practical look at how to close the AI readiness gap and operationalise AI for measurable ROI.
Danny is a molecular biologist by training, programmer by night, researcher and faculty developer by day, and educator at heart. A multiple international and national teaching award winner, he is Professor of Educational Technologies at the University of Sydney where he co-chairs the University’s AI in Education working group and leads the Cogniti.ai initiative that puts educators in the driver’s seat of AI.
Closing Comments
Data & AI Edge Peer Networking Drinks
An opportunity to stay, mingle and meet other attendees over drinks and food and discuss the day.