Agenda
Wednesday, 10 June 2026
“The Productivity Mandate: Trusted AI for a Leaner Public Sector”
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 2nd Government Edge: "The Productivity Mandate: Trusted AI for a Leaner Public Sector"
Jim Berry - CEO & Founder
Speaking with CIOs from both central and independent agencies the message is clear: the demand for productivity with less funding means agencies must close the gap on efficiency, capability, and trusted AI uplift. But as you know, our Productivity theme is far easier said than done.
After an incredible welcome in 2025, ADAPT Government Edge 2026 will create a safe place for the community to explore what matters most for public sector tech, digital, data and AI strategies. The aim to leave with meaningful, memorable and actionable Australian insights.
We start this strategic gathering with unique local insights to help APS leaders with their challenges and goals.
ADAPT Insights: What High Performers Do Differently?
Gabby Fredkin - Head of Analytics & Insights
ADAPT’s Research & Advisory team shares unique local data-driven insights from 2,000+ local surveys and executive conversations with Heads of IT, Digital, Security and Finance leaders. Now in its second year, Government Edge adds a clear benchmark of what high performers do differently, what has shifted since last year and how government compares with enterprise peers across our Edge communities.
Gabby distils what’s working in 2026: where agencies are prioritising spend, what’s slowing delivery, and which operating models are lifting cyber resilience, AI governance, data protection, and digital service outcomes. Walk away with practical benchmarks to validate your agenda, pressure-test investment decisions, and align stakeholders.
Get an Edge: Making the Most of Your Day
Government Edge Panel: The Productivity Mandate and Unified Transformation
Elissa Walker - Chief Digital Officer and Deputy Commissioner for Digital Delivery at ATO Nasa Walton - Chief Technology Officer at Department of Defence Justin Keefe - First Assistant Secretary, Digital and Security at Prime Minister and Cabinet Peter Hind - Principal Research Analyst
Peter Hind teases out insights from local APS champions on balancing interoperability, global innovation, and modular modernisation to unlock genuine productivity dividends.
– Can we evolve beyond fragmented funding to deliver a unified whole-of-government architecture?
– How do we balance Australian sovereignty with global innovation scale?
– Can modular modernisation and measured maturity models finally deliver the productivity dividend?
– Will shared talent pools successfully bridge the critical skills gap?
Morning Break
Refreshments, snacks & connections
Earning the AI Dividend: Productivity, Privacy, and Public Trust
Elizabeth Tydd - Australian Information Commissioner at Office of the Australian Information Commissioner Charles McHardie - Chief Information and Digital Officer at Services Australia Matt Boon - Senior Research Director
Information Commissioner Elizabeth Tydd and Services Australia’s Charles McHardie debate how the APS can accelerate AI productivity without breaking citizen trust or privacy mandates.
– Reconciling the push for algorithmic speed with OAIC’s transparency and privacy frameworks
– Adapting myGov’s AI rollout lessons to safely accelerate whole-of-government productivity mandates
– What does real accountability look like when automated decision-making influences citizen outcomes?
Scaling AI in the APS: When Control Becomes the Constraint
Neville Pinto - Strategic Security Advisor ANZ at SplunkAcross the Australian Public Service, AI is already live.
But in many environments, it’s being layered onto systems that aren’t fully visible, aren’t fully understood, and aren’t fully under control.
As the push for productivity accelerates, a harder truth is emerging: AI isn’t the constraint, control is.
In many APS environments, complexity is now outpacing visibility. As automation scales, the risk is no longer just cyber threats, but systems behaving in ways we don’t fully anticipate or understand.
This session examines what sits beneath the AI agenda—and why scaling safely depends on rebuilding visibility, assurance, and control.
– Why most failures now originate from complexity, not attack
– How AI is amplifying operational risk as much as capability
– Why visibility and control are becoming critical infrastructure for trusted AI
– What leaders must do to regain control as systems scale
Because in government, when systems fail, the impact isn’t just operational, it’s public.
From ERP Spend to Mission Impact: Funding Agentic AI
with Rimini StreetERP upgrade cycles can quietly consume the funding and delivery capacity meant for service improvement. Stabilising ERP as a secure, auditable system of record is what makes it realistic to fund trusted agentic AI -. AI that augments staff, automates routine work, and improves decision-making across finance, HR, supply chain, and service delivery.
– Which ERP costs are unavoidable, and which are vendor-driven churn?
– How to keep ERP secure, compliant, and customisable without re-platforming?
– Where agentic AI delivers measurable uplift: finance, HR, supply chain, services.
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.
Turning AI Ambition into Measurable Impact
Nathan Gumley - Executive, IT Software Engineering at Telstra Joy Marrocco - Group Owner Data AI Workforce at Telstra
Federal government departments are being asked to deliver AI driven productivity, real time decision making and resilient digital services at scale, yet Australia continues to lag global innovation and productivity benchmarks. In fact, Australia’s AI ambitions seem to be outpacing our human, operational and network readiness.
Telstra has several years under its belt, having practical experience implementing AI as part of its Connected Future 30 strategy, including providing AI tools to 75% of staff and training nearly 9,000 employees.
In this roundtable, we’ll discuss:
– AI’s role at Telstra: customer outcomes, use cases, early successes, challenges, and lessons learned.
– Examples of how enterprises modernising their networks are already closing the gap between ambition and execution, simplifying complexity, enabling real time workloads and unlocking productivity gains.
– Telstra’s investment in ongoing network modernisation and integrated cloud to edge capabilities to help Australian government move faster and turn AI ambition into measurable impact.
Demystifying the Blended Workforce: Managing Humans and Agents in Government
Shan Moorthy - Chief Technology Office APAC at Workday
The future of work in the public sector 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.
Defining the Digital Safety Pact: Shared Responsibility for AI and Cloud-Native Security
with Wiz– Focus: An executive conversation on the evolving relationship between the CISO and CIO/Platform Lead, particularly concerning the rapid adoption of cloud-native architectures and AI/GenAI services.
– Spark: As developers increasingly integrate AI models and cloud services, where does security ownership truly reside? How are your organizations defining and measuring the ‘shared responsibility’ for risks like Shadow AI, data exposure, and supply chain integrity from code to production?
Autonomous Ops: Mission-Critical Resilience at Lower Cost
with DynatraceHow can agencies use safe, auditable automation to sustain always-on services under budget pressure, skills shortages, and tighter compliance demands?
Discussion points:
– Balancing budget constraints with rising service expectations and the need to prevent costly outages
– Addressing skills shortages by reducing manual effort and reliance on scarce specialist expertise
– Reducing tool sprawl and operational complexity without creating vendor lock-in or breaching procurement and sovereignty rules.
– Improving compliance, audit readiness, and security oversight through better end-to-end visibility
Peer Networking Seated Lunch
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.
Delivering Digital Government That Works and Lasts
Andrew Weir - Federal Manager at Brennan Dave Stevens - Managing Director at Brennan
Australia’s public sector has no shortage of ambition. What is does have is a narrowing margin for error.
Expectations for faster, better services have never been higher. The public purse is under pressure. And technology leads are being asked to lift cyber resilience, modernise aging platforms, scale AI responsibly and build sovereign capability. All at once.
What can partners do to help convert the opportunity into durable, operational capabilities that deliver real productivity gains and public value?
In this roundtable, we’ll open the conversation to:
– Modernisation under constraint: how limitations can yield novel, and enduring solutions
– Operational sovereignty: recalibrating tech service dependencies to create greater autonomy
– What government should demand (and expect) from local technology partners
What it really takes to move AI from pilots into production, without creating new risk or governance gaps.
Delivering Productivity and Data-Led Capability Under Constraint
with SnowflakeHow a data-first, modular approach enables trusted AI and modernisation without the risks of large-scale system replacement.
Discussion points:
– Delivering measurable productivity improvements within tight fiscal and policy constraints.
– Why large-scale system replacement programs are no longer feasible.
– Addressing fragmented legacy environments that limit analytics and AI adoption.
– Decoupling data from core systems using a data-first, modular approach.
– Enabling trusted, scalable AI outcomes aligned to government priorities.
Trust Is the New Uptime: Why Sovereign Foundations Matter for Public Services
with Kinetic ITJoin this closed-door discussion to dive into key insights from ADAPT and Kinetic IT’s inaugural Sovereign Technology Report: From Complexity to Confidence. The 2026 Report is based on the latest data and conversations with senior public sector and critical infrastructure leaders across Australia and reveals how organisations are rethinking sovereignty as a foundation for resilience, service continuity and citizen trust.
In this session, we will unpack what sovereign delivery really means in practice and what it will require from technology leaders over the next decade.
Discussion Points:
– The four dimensions of sovereign delivery – Control, Assurance, Accountability, and Resilience
– The role of sovereign partners in maintaining continuity during crises or geopolitical disruption
– How locally controlled infrastructure and service management underpin resilience and citizen trust
– Designing services that meet privacy and data residency expectations without slowing innovation
Beyond Backup: Whole-of-Agency Resilience for AI and Cyber Threats
David Allott - Field Chief Information Security Officer, APJ at Veeam Software
Moving from basic restoration to rapid recovery, proactive data security, and the trusted foundations required for safe government AI.
Discussion points:
– Moving the metric from “can we restore” to “rapid recovery at scale”.
– Pressure-testing recovery against ransomware, insider threats, and outages.
– Why AI projects rely on trusted, governed, and recoverable data.
– Using DSPM to locate and secure sensitive data across hybrid estates.
– Metrics that prove true readiness to executives and risk committees
Afternoon Break
Reorganising for AI: New Operating Models for Public Value
Alan Thorogood - Research and Engagement at MIT CISR
AI is blurring the boundary between IT and business units, and that shift forces APS leaders to revisit decision rights, accountability, and how technology work is organised. In this keynote, MIT CISR’s Alan Thoroughgood cuts through the noise of “the end of IT” and “democratised development” by showing what top performers actually do to increase both speed and scale.
– Building for modularity and reuse: what does “good” look like in an APS context?
– What guardrails must IT leadership set so teams can move faster safely?
– Where should platforms standardise and enable, versus where should delivery innovate?
– How do we decide which capabilities are shared and which are domain-owned?
– How do we keep decision rights and accountability clear as AI embeds into services?
Lessons From Banking: Responsible AI Adoption for a Leaner Public Sector
David Walker - Former Group Chief Technology Officer at Westpac & DBS
How DBS and Westpac built the governance, operating models and risk frameworks to scale AI and deliver productivity uplift in highly regulated environments and what the APS can apply today.
After Robodebt, automation must be explainable, defensible and fair – but still deliver productivity gains. Scaling AI requires new privacy and risk frameworks, shared language, also trust between policy, legal, data and delivery.
While Australia’s financial sector leverages AI to redefine speed and precision, the APS faces a higher calling: adopting these same efficiencies while setting the global gold standard for algorithmic transparency and public trust.