Digital Excellence & Being Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With

David Avrin, CSP, GSF is one of the world’s leading Customer Experience speakers and consultants. He helps CEOs and organisations better understand and serve their changing customers and clients to help future-proof their businesses by becoming ridiculously easy to do business with. David’s the author of seven books: It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You!, Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back) and his newest book: Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With: A practical guide to giving customers what they want-when and how they want it. His business insights have been featured worldwide.

Marek Kowalkiewicz is a Professor and Chair in Digital Economy at QUT Business School. Listed among the Top 100 Global Thought Leaders in AI by thinkers360, Marek has led global innovation teams in Silicon Valley, was a Global Research Program Lead and Founding Research Manager of SAP’s Machine Learning lab in Singapore, and a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research Asia. His newest book, “The Economy of Algorithms: AI and the Rise of the Digital Minions”, is an international bestseller, recently released as an audiobook.

Andrea encourages people to be ‘future fit’ for their careers – through writing, speaking, and delivering high-impact leadership programs. She founded Future Fit Learning in 2012 – a small business that builds leaders who drive innovation, growth and cultural change by accelerating the ‘real skills’ needed to lead with impact. Through her programs, Andrea and her team have helped major businesses and global organisations (Rio Tinto, NBN, THALES, Orora & Austrade) develop leaders at all levels.

Prior to her move into learning, Andrea was a career television news reporter based in Washington D.C., covering major breaking news for major media outlets including Reuters, the Seven Network and Al Jazeera English. While in the US, she also worked across human rights; firstly helping to generate grants to rebuild Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan & Georgia with funding from USAID & the US State Department. And secondly; leading the communications team when the ‘Save Darfur’ advocacy movement lobbied the Obama administration to appoint a US Special Envoy to end the genocide in Darfur, which was achieved at the UN General Assembly in New York in 2009.

One year before the pandemic, Andrea released her first award-winning book, Future Fit: How to Stay Relevant and Competitive in the Future of Work’ – winner of the Australian Business Book of the Year 2019 and finalist in the UK Business Book Awards 2020. Andrea has been a member of the Australian HR Institute’s Future of Work Advisory Panel and is currently working on her second book, to be released in March 2025.

Stephen Hardy is a member of Bain & Co’s Advanced Analytics practice and has more than 20 years of experience building and deploying AI and machine learning across financial services, government, retail and consumer electronics. He works extensively to deliver practical solutions embodying responsible AI principles to clients across the Asia Pacific.

Stephen’s career has spanned the technology areas of customer experience optimisation, causal modelling of programmatic impacts, image and video recognition algorithms, and privacy-preserving data analytics.

He has published articles across a number of different fields and is a co-inventor on more than 15 US patents across multiple technology domains.

Prior to joining Bain, Stephen was formerly the CEO of Ambiata, a Sydney based data science services company and was also previously SGM of Canon Information Systems Research Australia Image and Video R&D Lab.

He holds a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Sydney and a BSc (Hons) with a university medal from the Australian National University.